Abstract
Tungsten occurs naturally in five isotopic forms; four of them, 182,183,184,186W, contribute significantly to the overall elemental abundance (with each contribution between 14 and 30 %), whereas 180W only occurs at the 0.12 % level and is a minor isotope. Given its very low abundance, a precise measurement of the thermal neutron-capture cross section is extremely challenging.
This work reports a new value of the thermal neutron-capture cross section from a direct 180W(n,γ) measurement using a guided-thermal beam at the Budapest Research Reactor, incident upon an 11.35 % enriched sample to induce prompt γ-ray activation within the sample. The thermal-capture cross section was determined as the sum of experimentally observed partial neutron-capture γ-ray cross sections feeding the ground state directly, and, the modeled contribution from the (unobserved) ground-state feeding predicted from statistical-model calculations using the Monte Carlo program DICEBOX.
The preliminary value of the 180W(n,γ) thermal neutron-capture cross section is 20.5(42) b.