Collaborative work between theory and experiment has resulted in significant improvement on the constraint of the 44Ti(alpha,p)47V reaction, which is critical to our understanding of supernova explosions. 44Ti is produced during a phase of the explosion where helium nuclei are highly abundant and the material is entropy-rich. 44Ti is observable from space-based telescopes such as COMPTEL and INTEGRAL, and detailed abundance maps of supernova remnants such as Cassiopeia A and SN1987A have been published. The observed 44Ti abundances are directly related to the supernova explosion energy and timescale, and the ratio of this abundance to other radioisotopes such as 56Ni provides a probe into the supernova explosion mechanism. During this alpha-rich phase, 44Ti is destroyed by the 44Ti(alpha,p)47V reaction, and this reaction has been implicated as a critical piece in understanding 44Ti afterglow. However, most supernova models utilize large uncertainties on this reaction rate, up to factors of 100, leading to potentially unrealistic uncertainties in the final abundances of 44Ti produced in an explosion. This work, undertaken by Kelly Chipps, Raph Hix, and collaborators, and with insight from Michael Smith, examined the existing data on this reaction rate and compared it to state-of-the-art reaction calculations. By combining the theoretical and experimental constraints, the uncertainty on the 44Ti(alpha,p)47V reaction rate was significantly reduced. The work was recently published in Phys. Rev. C 102, 035806.
