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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
M. Azam, R. S. Gowda, S. Ganesan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 152 | Number 3 | March 2006 | Pages 320-324
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-A2586
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The relative differential cross section for testing the validity of the Ramsauer model was previously introduced by Azam and Gowda. This quantity for intermediate energy neutron scattering processes is independent of the details of nuclear interaction and depends only on nuclear radius as a parameter. In this paper we use this quantity to predict the neutron total and differential shape-elastic cross sections. We show that, given the radius parameter, by making a measurement of the differential cross section at one angle, the total shape-elastic cross section (and hence the reaction cross section if the total cross section is known) can be determined to a good degree of accuracy. The forward-angle differential shape-elastic cross section is also well predicted. The method is of very general applicability and will be most useful in those situations where model-based fits to these quantities either do not exist or are unreliable for extrapolation/interpolation.