Resonances in Stellar Carbon Fusion

A quantitative study of the astrophysically important sub-barrier fusion of \(^{12}\)C+\(^{12}\)C is reported. Low-energy collisions are described in the body-fixed reference frame using wave-packet dynamics within a nuclear molecular picture. In contrast to conventional methods, such as the potential model and the coupled-channels approach, these new calculations reveal three resonant structures in the S-factor, explaining some structures observed in the data. The structures in the data that are not explained are possibly due to cluster effects in the nuclear molecule, which need to be included in the new approach.