Title: Radiation of low energy quanta in nuclear reactions
Abstract: The production of radiation concomitant with the elastic scattering of nucleons by nuclei is considered. It is shown that the first term of a series expansion of the differential radiation cross-section in the energy of the radiated quantum may be expressed in terms of the elastic scattering amplitudes at the incident and final energies. This result is valid even when there are resonances in the scattering whose widths are a small fraction of the energy loss. The interference between these 2 amplitudes permits the determination of the shape elastic amplitude, and therefore the cross-section for compound elastic scattering as well as the correlation distance W defined as the energy separation over which there is a substantial correlation in the fluctuations in the elastic scattering amplitude; its inverse measures the time delay in the reaction. When a resonance has a width of the order of the energy loss, the interference can be employed to evaluate the change of phase of the elastic scattering amplitude across the resonance and may therefore serve as an indicator of whether or not a fluctuation in the elastic cross-section is a resonance. These results when applied to reactions lead to a method for the measurement of the relative amount of direct and compound nuclear processes and to a direct test of the random phase approximation of the statistical hypothesis in nuclear reactions. A derivation of our principal result valid for relativistic particles is also given.
Publication Year: 1962
Publication Date: 1962-08-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 147
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