Proton capture reactions from silicon to phosphorus play an important role in explosive hydrogen burning in novae. However, proton capture cross sections are hard to determine experimentally and in many cases, involve radioactive isotopes. To address this, we employ spectroscopic factors which are calculations that can help guide estimates of crosssections and steer experimentalists to the more interesting cases. In this work, we calculate the spectroscopic factors for phosphorus isotopes using the nuclear shell model, finding agreement with literature values for 26–29 P and making predictions for other phosphorus isotopes in the chain. We predict that the ground state spectroscopic factor of the nuclear reaction 25 Si(p, γ) 26 P is 0.6.
Yao et al. (Wed,) studied this question.