Influence of Tunneling on Electron Screening in Low Energy Nuclear Reactions

Using a semiclassical mean field theory, we show that the screening potential exhibits a characteristic radial variation in the tunneling region in sharp contrast to the assumption of the constant shift in all previous works. Also, we show that the explicit treatment of the tunneling region gives a larger screening energy than that in the conventional approach, which studies the time evolution only in the classical region and estimates the screening energy from the screening potential at the external classical turning point. This modification becomes important if the electronic state is not a single adiabatic state at the external turning point. Furthermore, as an alternative solution of the screening problem, we give the estimation for the effect of extra electrons which are caught into the ground state of the projectile by using constraint molecular dynamics.