Phenomenology of preequilibrium angular distributions

The systematics of continuum angular distributions from a wide variety of light ion nuclear reactions have been studied. To first order, the shape of the angular distributions have been found to depend only on the energy of the outgoing particle and on the division of the cross section into multi-step direct and multi-step compound parts. The angular distributions can be described in terms of Legendre polynomials with the reduced polynomial coefficients exhibiting a simple dependence on the outgoing particle energy. Two integer and four continuous parameters with universal values are needed to describe the coefficients for outgoing energies of 2 to 60 MeV in all the reaction types studied. This parameterization combined with a modified Griffin model computer code permits the calculation of double differential cross sections for light ion continuum reactions where no data is available