The new Felsenkeller 5 MV underground accelerator: Status and Program

Experimental nuclear astrophysics aims to study, in the laboratory, the nuclear reactions taking place in stars. However, at the energies relevant to stellar burnings, the relevant cross sections are strongly reduced by the repulsive Coulomb barrier. As a result, ion beam experiments in underground laboratories shielded from cosmic ray effects are needed in order to gain precise data. The Felsenkeller 5 MV accelerator, below 45 m rock in Dresden, is the first such accelerator on the MV scale in Europe. The laboratory was jointly built by HZDR and TU Dresden and opened in 2018. Both an internal and an external ion source have already been tested successfully underground. The accelerator itself is under commissioning, as well as a high-sensitivity radioactivity counting setup by TU Dresden. The talk will summarise the science case and the status for the new laboratory.