It is known that gravitational confinement and supernovae facilitate the synthesis of heavy nuclides; and, that magnetic confinement is thought to facilitate the deuterium-lithium fusion in human-constructed systems.
Is heavy nuclide synthesis through an artificial mechanism such as magnetic confinement thought possible or impossible?
A big problem with fusing heavy elements with magnetic confinement is that the reaction rate will peak at higher and higher temperatures. For example, this article shows the cross section for carbon peaking at a few MeV:
Deuterium-tritium, on the other hand, peaks near 50 keV. The trouble with really high temperatures is that radiation losses from bremsstrahlung become much larger and so it's much more difficult to keep energy confined in the plasma. Stars get away with this because they're huge and dense and even radiation takes forever to escape.
