Studying Sodium Production in Globular Clusters via the ²³Na(³He,d)²⁴Mg Reaction

Globular clusters are dense, gravitationally bound collections of hundreds of thousands of stars. Our theories of stellar evolution, at the present time, cannot account for the observed anticorrelation between sodium and oxygen in cluster stars. While the astrophysical site of these so called abundance anomalies is still unknown, this chemical signature indicates the in situ processing of

stellar material by hydrogen burning at temperatures of 50 - 100 MK. Unfortunately, many key thermonuclear reaction rates suffer from large uncertainties at these temperatures, including the proton induced sodium destroying reactions. Using the Split-pole Spectrograph at Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory, we measured the ²³Na(³He,d)²⁴Mg transfer reaction. Using first-of-their-kind Bayesian analysis techniques, we have extracted excitation energies and proton partial widths with rigorous uncertainties. Stellar models using our updated values reaffirm the delicate interplay between ²³Na(p, γ) and ²³Na(p, α) at the temperatures relevant to globular cluster nucleosynthesis.