Lithium photodisintegration with unpolarized photon beams at near threshold energies

Abstract

The study of photonuclear reactions with lithium targets i.e. photodisintegration of lithium in addition to other photonuclear reactions is of considerable interest to the fields of nuclear physics, astrophysics, laser physics and several applications such as non - destructive testing of nuclear materials. We propose to study photodisintegration of lithium with unpolarized photon beams at near threshold energies. Our model independent theoretical approach, which makes use of irreducible tensor techniques, is well suited for making predictions on the spin observables as well as the differential cross section. In this paper we analyze the reaction channel 7Li + γ → 6Li + n by using unpolarized photons.