Neutron Induced Charged particle Emission

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The atomic nuclei are made of protons and neutrons. Although free neutrons exist only on short time-scales in nature, because they are unstable, neutron-induced reactions play an important role in our society. Their impact ranges from medical applications in cancer therapy over purely technological challenges in reactor sciences to fundamental questions like the origin of the elements. Despite their importance only a limited number of neutron-induced reactions are investigated so far. This is especially true for neutron-induced reactions producing charged particles. For this reason the project NICE (Neutron Induced Charged particle Emission) focuses on cross section measurements of these reactions. The corresponding experiments require the detection of charged reaction products. They have only a short range in matter, which poses several challenges to the experiment. First of all, thin targets are needed allowing the reaction products to escape from the sample itself. The correspondingly small number of sample nuclei hampers the determination of cross sections. Therefore, high neutron fluxes and a short distance between the neutron-production target and the detector are needed to compensate for the small number of sample nuclei. The drawback is the high background of neutrons and gamma-rays in the detector. A detection setup, which is optimized to deal with these challenges, will be developed within the scope of the NICE Project. The combination of this detection setup with the new neutron source FRANZ will offer the possibility to study a large variety of neutron-induced reactions with unprecedented sensitivity. Within the project a measurement of the astrophysically important reaction 33S(n,a) will be performed to prove the capabilities of the new detector setup at FRANZ.