Chemical binding effects on resonant scattering of neutrons

Earlier calculations of the chemical binding effect on neutron resonance broadening do not agree with experimental results. A possible source of this difference is that the calculations have only examined the effect of chemical binding on resonant absorption and have not investigated the effect on resonant scattering. It is vital that we understand the discrepancy between the computed and measured chemical binding effect. Therefore the resonant differential scattering cross section is calculated for a harmonic crystal model to examine the chemical binding effect of resonant scattering. We show that, at high temperatures or high resonance energies, scattering can be treated using ideal gas with the same effective temperature as for absorption accounting for chemical binding effects. Although the resonance broadening is determined in terms of a four-point correlation function, it is found that this broadening can still be written in terms of the usual ψ-function and the effect of chemical binding in both resonance absorption and scattering is not large enough to account for the large measured effect. Thus the experiments that show a substantial amount of chemical binding must be reevaluated. (author). 32 refs