A study on photonuclear cross-section of ⁹³Nb(γ,n)⁹²Nb reaction and covariance analysis

Photon induced nuclear reactions are of much interested in various branches of science and technology. Particularly medical linac accelerators produced high energy Bremsstrahlung that can induce photo nuclear reactions on various accessories of treatment systems. The measurement and analysis of cross section for the reaction ⁹³Nb(γ,n)⁹²Nb has been done employing activation technique. ¹¹⁵In(γ,n) ¹¹⁴In has been used as monitor reaction to determine the integrated flux. The experiments have been conducted using the medical linac facility for the activation of the sample and offline γ-spectroscopy has been done using CZT detector. Bremsstrahlung of active average energies 9.53, 10.85 and 12.51 MeV are produced by irradiating a thick layer of lead by electron beams of energies 12, 16 and 20 MeV respectively. Both the target samples, Niobium and the monitor foils, indium, are simultaneously irradiated in parallel and the cross section for ⁹³Nb(γ,n)⁹²Nb reaction was calculated at each energies. Covariance analysis of the data has been performed for systematic estimation of the error. The measured data has been analysed using two independent nuclear reaction codes Empire and Talys. (author)