The interactions of 14 MeV neutrons with⁵⁹Co and⁹³Nb

Abstract

A detailed analysis is made of the reactions of 14 MeV neutrons with 5yC0 and 93Nb. The quantum mechanical reaction theory of Feshbach and co-workers has been used to analyse the emission spectra for the (n, nx), (n, px) and (p, nx) multistep compound reactions. Acceptable fits are obtained to the energy spectra provided the contributions from the (n, 2n) and (n, pn) reactions, also calculated with the statistical multistep compound formalism, are added at low outgoing energies. The cross sections in all open channels are calculated and compared with experiment.

Multistep compound reaction calculations using the Feshbach-Kerman-Koonin theory

“…The multistep compound (MSC) reaction theory of Feshbach, Kerman and Koonin (FKK) (1980) has been extensively applied to analyse a range of (n, n' ), (p, p'), (n, p) and (p, n) reactions at incident energies from IO to 20 MeV (Bonetti et al 1981, Field et ul 1986, Chadwick era1 1988, Koumdjieva and Hodgson 1989. In all cases the theory gives a good fit to the data with consistent values for the effective interaction strength VO and standard optical model and level density parameters.…”