Speaker
Description
The surrogate reaction method is an alternative to direct measurements of compound nuclear reaction cross sections [1,2]. We introduce new theory tools for extracting capture cross sections from experiments that use proton inelastic scattering as a surrogate reaction mechanism. These extensions including two-step processes in populating the target nucleus in the proton inelastic scattering surrogate mechanism, Markov Chain Monte Carlo parameter inference for constraining the level density and gamma-ray strength function parameters, and accounting for the impact of partial-width fluctuations on the γ-emission probability due to the low-density of states available in competing particle emission channels. We apply these developments to 90Zr(p,p’γ) experimental data [3] to constrain the neutron capture cross section for 89Zr isotope which has a half-life of about 78 hours. We simultaneously determine the known proton capture cross section for 89Y as a benchmark for our approach.
References
[1] J. Escher et al. (2018). Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 052501
[2] A. Ratkiewicz et al. (2019) Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 052502.
[3] A. Thapa et al. (2025) arXiv:2511.03071
[4] S. Ota et al. (2015) Phys. Rev. C 92, 054603
Acknowledgements
This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344, with partial support from LDRD projects 20-ERD-030 and 19-ERD-017.
| Contribution category | Theory |
|---|---|
| Presenter status | Faculty/Staff |