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Nuclear cross sections are used in determining the nuclear reaction rate, and are governed by the reaction rate equation for a particular set of particles (usually viewed as a "beam and target" thought experiment where one particle or nucleus is the "target", which is typically at rest, and the other is treated as a "beam", which is a projectile with a given energy).
Image of a helium-4 nucleus; 4 H has a very small cross-section, less than 0.01 barn.. During Manhattan Project research on the atomic bomb during World War II, American physicists Marshall Holloway and Charles P. Baker were working at Purdue University on a project using a particle accelerator to measure the cross sections of certain nuclear reactions.
Cross sections can be computed for atomic collisions but also are used in the subatomic realm. For example, in nuclear physics a "gas" of low-energy neutrons collides with nuclei in a reactor or other nuclear device, with a cross section that is energy-dependent and hence also with well-defined mean free path between collisions.
In nuclear physics, the concept of a neutron cross section is used to express the likelihood of interaction between an incident neutron and a target nucleus. The neutron cross section σ can be defined as the area in cm 2 for which the number of neutron-nuclei reactions taking place is equal to the product of the number of incident neutrons that would pass through the area and the number of ...
The absorption neutron cross section of an isotope of a chemical element is the effective cross-sectional area that an atom of that isotope presents to absorption and is a measure of the probability of neutron capture. It is usually measured in barns. Absorption cross section is often highly dependent on neutron energy. In general, the ...
In physics, absorption cross-section is a measure of the probability of an absorption process. More generally, the term cross-section is used in physics to quantify the probability of a certain particle-particle interaction, e.g., scattering , electromagnetic absorption , etc. (Note that light in this context is described as consisting of ...
One must calculate multiple diagrams to get the net cross section. The exact analytic form for the cross section of pair production must be calculated through quantum electrodynamics in the form of Feynman diagrams and results in a complicated function. To simplify, the cross section can be written as:
In nuclear physics, the astrophysical S-factor S(E) is a rescaling of a nuclear reaction's total cross section σ(E) to account for the Coulomb repulsion between the charged reactants. It determines the rates of nuclear fusion reactions that occur in the cores of stars.