Investigations of Reaction Cross Sections for Protons and 3He

The reaction cross section gives the probability that a particle will undergo a nonelastic process when passing through a nuclear medium. Therefore reaction cross section data are of importance both for theoretical studies and for applications in such diverse fields as medicine, biology, astrophysics and accelerator-driven transmutation of nuclear waste. There exist many data sets with angular distributions of elastic scattering, but very few measurements of the complementary reaction cross section have been performed. The measurement is in principle simple but has in practice proved to be very difficult to perform, and the relatively limited amount of experimental data displays some serious inconsistencies. Results from measurements of reaction cross sections are presented for:3He on 9Be, 12C, 16O, 28Si, 40Ca, 58,60Ni, 112,116,1 and 208Pb at 96, 138 and 167 MeV; protons on 12C, 40Ca, 90Zr and 208Pb at six energies in the energy range 80-180 MeV, and on 58Ni at 81 MeV. Experimental uncertainties were 3-9% for 3He and 1.5-8% for protons. The apparatus and the experimental method used for the measurements of reaction cross sections, using a modified attenuation technique, is described. The detection method enables simultaneous measurements of reaction cross sections for five different sizes of the solid angles in steps from 99.0 to 99.8% of the total solid angle. The final results are obtained by extrapolation to the full solid angle. Experimental results are compared with predictions from optical model calculations using phenomenological global optical potentials. Phenomenological parametrizations of reaction cross sections for scattering of projectiles on targets are presented. The parametrizations show that reaction cross sections are very sensitive to matter distributions at very large radii of both the projectile and the target. For protons the derived relations makes it possible to predict the reaction cross sections on targets for which no experimental data exist