Effects of angular-momentum conservation in unified pre-equilibrium and equilibrium reaction models

The master-equation theory of precompound and compound nuclear decay is generalized to the inclusion of the conservation of angular momentum. It is demonstrated that the constructed model contains the Hauser-Feshbach, Weisskopf-Ewing as well as standard exciton models as limiting cases. This unified pre-equilibrium/Hauser-Feshbach model, which may be considered as a practicable version of the quantum-statistical, so-called AWM theory of Agassi et al., has been computationally optimized, such that the related numerical effort has become comparable to or less than that of a standard Hauser-Feshbach calculation. With this unified model the nature and importance of some spin effects in pre-equilibrium reactions has been investigated. The main conclusion from numercial calculations is that the standard precompound-model results are close to those of the angular-momentum conseving model, implying that the popular semi-classical models are quite reliable in this respect from a practical point of view. (orig.)