Nuclear Reaction Analysis

Abstract

Nuclear reaction analysis (NRA) is one among the numerous analytical techniques involving the irradiation of a material with energetic particles. In NRA methods we exclude any remnant radioactivity together with interactions leading to the scattering of the incident particle only: this last procedure leads to RBS (Rutherford backscattering spectroscopy) and ERD (elastic recoil detection). In NRA the nature of the emitted particle used as an analytical signal is obviously different from that of the incident one. In order to avoid permanent radioactivity, the energy of the projectile is maintained at a sufficiently low value (below 6 MeV, easily available using a small accelerator). Consequently, due to the large coulomb barrier around heavy nuclei, only light nuclei may be easily identified (atomic mass less than or equal to 30). After discussing the kinematics and fundamentals of the interactions, we present examples of applications in material sciences, archaeological and biological materials.

Bayes and Frequentism: a particle physicist’s perspective

“…Demortier [13] has drawn attention to the fact that it can be useful to calculate the minimum Bayes factor [14]. This is defined as above, but with the extra nuisance parameters of H 1 set at values that minimise B 01 , i.e.…”