Energy-broadened proton beam for production of quasi-stellar neutrons from the 7Li(p,n)7Be reaction

Production of quasi-stellar neutrons by the 7Li(p,n)7Be reaction has been used for measuring s-process cross sections and efforts to upgrade the proton beam intensity with RF linear accelerators are presently ongoing. We investigated the effect of an energy-broadened proton beam, as is expected for a RF linear accelerator, on the produced 25-keV semi-Maxwellian neutron spectrum and compared it to that of a Van de Graaff accelerator with well-defined proton energy. Neutron spectrum measurements from 0○ to 80○ were carried out with a pulsed proton beam at the IRMM Van de Graaff accelerator using time-of-flight techniques, both with a narrow energy spread (sigma≈1.5 keV) proton beam and with an energy-broadened beam (sigma≈20 keV) obtained by straggling through a Au-foil degrader. In the latter case, the neutron spectrum is closer to the Maxwellian flux distribution in the high neutron energy region.

FEINBERG G.;  SHOR A.;  BERKOVITS D;  EISEN Y.;  FRIEDMAN M;  GIORGINIS Georgios;  HIRSH T.;  KRASA Antonin;  PAUL M.;  PLOMPEN Arjan;  TSUK E.; 

2013-09-19

INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS

JRC73934

1742-6588,   

http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/337/1/012044/,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC73934,   

10.1088/1742-6596/337/1/012044,