International Conference on Nuclear Data for Science and Technology 2007
DOI: 10.1051/ndata:07481

The cross section of the ¹⁶O(n,α)¹³C reaction in the MeV energy range

G. Giorginis¹, V. Khryachkov^{1, 2}, V. Corcalciuc^{1, 3} and M. Kievets<sup>1

1</sup>  European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Reference Materials and Measurements (IRMM), 2440 Geel, Belgium
²  Institute for Physics and Power Engineering (IPPE), 249020 Obninsk, Russia
³  Institute for Physics and Nuclear Engineering, P.O. Box MG6, Bucharest, Romania

georgios.giorginis@ec.europa.eu

Published online: 21 May 2008

Abstract
A novel spectrometer was developed and used to measure the cross section for the ¹⁶O(n,α) reaction at IRMM. The basic parts of the new instrument are an ionisation chamber, a gas oxygen target, and signal digitisation. It is shown that simultaneous digitisation of the anode and cathode signals allows an effective background suppression and the accurate determination of the number of reaction events and the number of atoms in the gas target. Cross section values for the ¹⁶O(n,α) reaction measured in the energy range 3.95-9.0 MeV are presented. None of the existing nuclear data libraries describes well the IRMM data in the entire energy range.

© CEA 2008