Low energy Mg + Ne fusion studies in applications of pycnuclear burning in accreting neutron stars

In the crust of an accreting neutron star, there are many kinds of nuclear reactions that can occur such as neutron emission, electron capture, and pycnonuclear burning. And of those reactions, current models predict that pycnonuclear burning contributes the most to crustal heating, specifically in the neutron-rich mass regions of Mg + Mg, Ne + Ne, and Mg + Ne fusion. However, there is a lack of experimental data in the neutron-rich and stable mass regions of these fusion reactions, and as a result, calculated cross-sections using different models can differ by many orders of magnitude at the energies of interest. To constrain a portion of these fusion cross-sections, experiments in the stable mass regions of Mg and Ne have been performed in the Nuclear Science Lab at the University of Notre Dame using the FN Tandem Accelerator and the ND-Cube, an active-target time projection chamber. Results of the ²⁴Mg + ²⁰Ne and ²⁶Mg + ²⁰Ne fusion experiments will be presented, in addition to an outlook for experiments in neutron-rich mass regions of Mg + Ne fusion at user facilities, and the development of a simulation program to perform grid search beam parameter optimization for online analysis of future experiments.