Scandal - a facility for elastic neutron scattering studies in the 50-130 mev range

Abstract

Recently, a large number of applications involving high-energy (> 20 MeV) neutrons have become important. Examples are development of spallation sources, transmutation of nuclear waste, fast-neutron cancer therapy, as well as dose effects for airflight personnel and electronics failures due to cosmic-ray neutrons.Elastic neutron scattering plays a key role for the understanding of all these areas. The most important reason is that it allows a determination of the optical potential, which plays a decisive role in every microscopic calculation including neutrons in either the entrance or exit channel. In addition, the elastic cross section is also the largest of the individual partial cross sections contributing to the total cross section.A facility for detection of scattered neutrons in the energy interval 50-130 MeV, SCANDAL (SCAttered Nucleon Detection AssembLy), has recently been installed at the 20-180 MeV neutron beam facility of the The Svedberg Laboratory, Uppsala. It is primarily intended for studies of elastic neutron scattering, but can be used for the (n, p) t and (n, d) reaction experiments as well.The performance of the spectrometer is illustrated in measurements of the (n, p) and (n, n) reactions on 1H and 12 C at 96 MeV. © 2014 Atomic Energy Society of Japan.