SPIN ASSIGNMENT OF NEUTRON RESONANCES VIA (n, g) AND (n, a) REACTIONS

M. Przytula

Several methods exist, and have been used in the past, for determining the spins of neutron resonances. However the present review is limited to those techniques which exploit the spin dependence of (n, g) and (n, a) spectra. These methods, which turned out to be very productive, are essentially based on the systematics of the g and a decay for the various multipolarities. In the case of radiative capture, two methods, and the results achieved, are described in detail: i) the multiplicity method; ii) the low-lying level population method. Both techniques apply to those compound nuclei for which radiative capture can be described by the statistical model, namely most nuclei with atomic weight A>90-100, with the possible exception of those having magic or near-magic proton or neutron numbers. The first method has the merit of having provided large amounts of spin assignments at times which were technologically less advanced than the present ones: its main drawback however is the fact of not being applicable to odd--even target nuclei. The second method is not subject to this limitation while presenting at the same time spin effects much larger than those of the multiplicity method. The obtained results have been used to provide estimates of the spin cut-off parameter s and to study the possible spin dependence of the s-wave neutron strength function. Spin assignments of p-wave resonances have helped in the analysis of the parity nonconservation measurements performed by the TRIPLE thus improving the estimates of the weak spreading width Gw. In this context it has been found that the population of the low-lying states depends significantly not only on the parity of the initial state. Finally, spin assignments based on (n, a) reaction are described for the target nuclei 143Nd and 147Sm.

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