Sensitivity of neutron scattering to low energy collective excitations

The strong coupling between scattering to ground and first excited 2+ levels of even A nuclei makes low energy neutron scattering a powerful tool for assessing their collective excitation strengths. Higher even parity excited levels are much less strongly coupled to ground state scattering, and the corresponding transition amplitudes are extracted from neutron scattering with less confidence. The sensitivity with which coupling can be assessed for several levels of nuclei, and the sensitivity to details of nuclear structure, will be examined. At incident energies well above low lying collective excitations, elastic scattering is not sensitive to nuclear structure details. The enhanced sensitivity of elastic scattering to structure properties at lower incident energies will be illustrated for the shape transitional nuclei near A = 190. Recent results of microscopic model calculations will also be presented, to illustrate the structure insights which can be obtained with those methods