ABSTRACT
The chapter describes the stages of understanding with regard to those effects of enhancement in the rates of nuclear reactions expected from the correlation and thermodynamic effects, for various realizations of the condensed plasmas both in the astrophysical and laboratory settings. Nuclear reactions may be grouped into two elementary classifications: the usual binary processes and few-particle processes. Lithium hydride under ultrahigh pressure appears to offer another system of interest, though the ranges of temperatures and pressures required for achieving a significant level of reactions are substantially greater than those in the cases of liquid metallic hydrogen. The subject of nuclear fusion in dense plasmas is viewed as a forum in which the interplay between nuclear physics and statistical physics may be studied usefully through the concept of such correlation functions. The special features of nuclear fusion in dense plasmas rest in enhancement of the reaction rates over those fundamental processes due to internuclear many-particle processes.
