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PHYS01200804001 Sohrab Abbas - Homi Bhabha National Institute

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potential for most nuclei in spite of the attractive nature of basic neutron-nuclear interaction. The<br />

dependence of b c on the atomic mass (Fig.2) is quite irregular [119] with only a few nuclei<br />

displaying negative scattering lengths [5,131].<br />

If all scattering nuclei are identical, neutrons scattered from different nuclei have a definite phase<br />

relationship and coherent scattering results. On the contrary, there is no definite phase relationship<br />

between waves from scattered different isotopes (isotopic incoherent scattering) or from nuclei<br />

with random spin orientations in the sample (spin incoherent scattering) [1-2,4,24-27,119,129-<br />

130].<br />

If the sample contains different isotopes with fractional isotopic abundances f i , distributed<br />

randomly, the coherent b c , the isotopic incoherent b I , and the total b, scattering lengths are<br />

computed by accounting for the isotopic abundances, viz.,<br />

bC fi b<br />

i<br />

,<br />

(5)<br />

i<br />

2<br />

b f f b b<br />

(6)<br />

I i j i j<br />

i<br />

j<br />

Fig2. The distribution of coherent scattering lengths as a function of atomic mass number [5,119].<br />

14

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