Lifetime Measurement of the 6.79 MeV Excited State of 15O to Help Constrain the 14N(p,gamma)15O Reaction Rate

In main sequence stars such as our Sun, the source of energy comes from converting hydrogen into helium. There are two competing mechanisms via which this can happen: the pp chain and CNO cycle. The latter is a cycle of reactions involving carbon, nitrogen and oxygen which are catalysts for the conversion of hydrogen into helium. The slowest reaction 14N(p,γ)15O in the cycle will affect the energy generation timescale and the amount of helium ash produced via the CNO cycle. This has several astrophysical impacts. It affects the evolutionary timescale of main sequence stars from which the ages of globular clusters can be calculated, the nucleosynthesis of heavier elements in H burning shells of red giant stars, and the fraction of energy produced by the CNO cycle compared to the pp chain in our Sun which helps determine the interior composition of the Sun. For main sequence stars the CNO cycle dominates over the pp chain for core temperatures T < 0.02 GK. For the 14N(p,γ)15O reaction this corresponds to a low center of mass energy Ecm = 30 keV. This is lower than the low energy limit of the reaction rate measurable in the laboratory. This means that we need to extrapolate down to low energy using theory. The largest remaining uncertainty in the theoretical calculations is due to the lifetime τ of the 6.79 MeV state of 15O. In this work the lifetimes of three excited states of 15O were measured using the Doppler shift attenuation method (DSAM) populating the states via the 3He(16O,α)15O reaction at a beam energy of 50 MeV. The low lifetime limit measurable using the DSAM is ∼1 fs. The lifetime of the 6.79 MeV state is near that limit, making this measurement challenging. A 1.8 fs upper limit (68.3% C.L.) on this lifetime is reported here. In addition we measured the lifetimes of the 6.17 and 6.86 MeV state in 15O which were < 2.5 fs and 13.3+0.8−1.2 fs (68.3% C.L.) respectively.