Measurement of (n, f) and (n, xn) cross sections with surrogate reaction method

Abstract

Surrogate reaction method is an important approach to overcome the difficulties meet in the direct measurement of neutron induced nuclear reaction. The current existing surrogate reactions generally employ the peripheral reactions such as inelastic excitation and transfer reaction where the involved angular momenta are much larger than the neutron capture reaction, which causes a difficulty in theoretical correction of spin of compound nucleus. We proposed to use capture reaction of light charged particle as the surrogate reaction, thus the spin distributions of compound nucleus in two reactions are quite similar and therefore the spin correction is not strongly desired. Based on this idea, the 239Pu(n, f) and (n, 2n) cross sections were successfully extracted by using 236U(α,, f) and (α, 2n) reactions as the surrogate reactions. The well coincidence of the present results with the data of ENDFB7 within the error bars shows the reliability of the proposed surrogate capture reaction method.