Absolute measurement of the photodisintegration of deuterium

This experiment measured the differential cross section for deuteron photodisintegration between photon energies of 63 and 71 MeV. The photon beam was produced by the bremsstrahlung of an 88.4 MeV CW electron beam, from the University of Illinois Nuclear Physics Laboratory electron microtron, in a 1.4 x 10-3 radiation length aluminum converter. The photon energy was determined to .25 MeV by the technique of bremsstrahlung tagging. The deuterium target gas, at atmospheric pressure, was contained in a thin walled cylinder 2.4 m long. The protons from deuteron photo-disintegration were detected in the LArge Solid Angle detector, which was built for this experiment. The LASA detector consists of three concentric, cylindrical MWPC chambers surrounded by segmented plastic scintillators. The target cylinder is on the axis of the chamber. Particles were collected from 20 degrees to 160 degrees, the angle determined by the charge division technique in the wire chamber. The de/dx measurements in the wire chamber and the scintillators allowed the separation of protons from electrons. The differential cross sections have been fit by Legendre polynomials. These results are in reasonable agreement with previous experiments and theoretical calculations