We report on the measurement of the ^{7}Be(n,p)^{7}Li cross section from thermal to approximately 325 keV neutron energy, performed in the high-flux experimental area (EAR2) of the n_TOF facility at CERN. This reaction plays a key role in the lithium yield of the big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) for standard cosmology. The only two previous time-of-flight measurements performed on this reaction did not cover the energy window of interest for BBN, and they showed a large discrepancy between each other. The measurement was performed with a Si telescope and a high-purity sample produced by implantation of a ^{7}Be ion beam at the ISOLDE facility at CERN. While a significantly higher cross section is found at low energy, relative to current evaluations, in the region of BBN interest, the present results are consistent with the values inferred from the time-reversal ^{7}Li(p,n)^{7}Be reaction, thus yielding only a relatively minor improvement on the so-called cosmological lithium problem. The relevance of these results on the near-threshold neutron production in the p+^{7}Li reaction is also discussed.

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R7T7‐type glass samples doped with different concentrations of 244Cm and stored for different time periods to produce different levels of accumulated radiation damage were analyzed by differential scanning calorimetry to better understand the structural evolution of R7T7 nuclear glass due to the accumulation of α radiation damage. The stored energy and fictive temperature were observed to increase as a function of the α decay dose. The stored energy saturates at about 1018 α decays·g−1, whereas the fictive temperature continues to increase and saturates at about 6–7 × 1018 α decays·g−1. This discrepancy was interpreted in terms of different effects of energy lost during α decay on the glass structure due to electronic stopping and nuclear stopping. This study demonstrates that the stored energy is affected by both phenomena, whereas the fictive temperature variation depends mainly on elastic collisions. The increase of fictive temperature with the cumulative α dose is direct evidence that the energy lost by recoil nuclei induces the formation of a new structure similar to a fast‐quenched glass.

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