Measurement of (n, f) and (n, xn) Cross Sections of Actinides with the Surrogate Reaction Method

There are always difficulties in the direct measurement of reactions induced by neutron, in order to obtain the neutron induced nuclear reaction data which are extremely important for nuclear power development, the surrogate reaction method, which uses charged particles instead of neutron, was proposed. The existing surrogate reaction method generally chooses peripheral reaction as the surrogate reaction, such as inelastic scattering excitation or transfer reaction. As a result, the angular momentum involved is always far larger than the neutron induced reaction, which causes difficulties in the theoretical calculation. Because of this, we proposed to use light-ion capture reaction as the surrogate reaction, the compound nuclei spin is similar with that of the neutron induced reaction, so that the difficulties in spin correction can be effectively avoided. Based on this idea, the ²³⁹Pu(n, f) and (n, 2n) reaction cross sections were successfully extracted using ²³⁶U(α,f) and (α,2n) reactions as the surrogate reaction. The results coincide well with the data of ENDFB7 within the error range, which shows that the surrogate reaction method has its own superiority, and it can be applied in the measurement of nuclear data.