Status report on the analysis of inelastic neutron scattering from carbon, iron, yttrium and lead at 96 MeV

TL;DR

This paper reports on the analysis of inelastic neutron scattering data from carbon, iron, yttrium, and lead at 96 MeV, providing new experimental cross sections and angular distributions to enhance nuclear reaction models.

Contribution

It introduces an extended data analysis method to extract inelastic scattering information from existing elastic scattering data at 96 MeV neutron energy.

Findings

Double-differential cross sections obtained for multiple nuclei.

Angular distributions of inelastic neutron scattering measured.

Progress on improving detector response function modeling.

Abstract

This work is part of an effort to provide more experimental data for the (n,n'x) reaction. The experiments were carried out at The Svedberg Laboratory in Uppsala, Sweden, at the quasi-mono-energetic neutron beam of 96 MeV, before the facility was upgraded in 2004. Using an extended data analysis of data primarily intended for measuring elastic neutron scattering only, it was found to be possible to extract information on the inelastic scattering from several nuclei. In the preliminary data analysis, an iterative forward-folding technique was applied, in which a physically reasonable trial spectrum was folded with the response function of the detector system and the output was compared to the experimental data. As a result, double-differential cross sections and angular distributions of inelastic neutron scattering from 12-C, 56-Fe, 89-Y and 208-Pb could be obtained. In this paper, a status update on the efforts to improve the description of the detector response function is given.