- Gamow factor
The Gamow Factor or Gamow-Sommerfeld Factorcite paper
author = Yoon, Jin-Hee
coauthors = Wong, Cheuk-Yin
title = Relativistic Modification of the Gamow Factor
publisher = Physics Division,Oak Ridge National Laboratory
date =February 9 ,2008
url = http://arxiv.org/abs/nucl-th/9908079
format =PDF
accessdate = 2008-06-27] , named after its discovererGeorge Gamow , is a probability factor for two nuclear particles' chance of overcoming theCoulomb barrier in order to undergo nuclear reactions, for example innuclear fusion . Classically, there is almost no possibility for protons to fuse by crossing each other's Coulomb barrier, but when George Gamow instead appliedquantum mechanics to the problem, he found that there was a significant chance for the fusion due to tunneling.This probability increases rapidly with increasing particle energy, but at a given temperature the probability of a particle having a high energy falls off rapidly, following the
Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution . Gamow found that, taken together, these effects mean that for any given temperature, the particles that actually fuse are mostly in a (temperature-dependent) narrow range of energies known as the Gamow window. [cite web|title=Temperature and Pressure in Stars|publisher=Dept. Physics & AstronomyUniversity of Tennessee|url=http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/energy/temp-press.html]References
External links
* [http://www.imsc.res.in/~ino/Talks/mcctalk.pdf D. Indumathi, OH set: What can you tell from a hole in the ground?]
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
