Nuclear Bremsstrahlung

Abstract

A formalism for the bremsstrahlung accompanying scattering of nucleons is developed in which the nuclear potential is explicitly worked into the radiation matrix elements. The result is an expansion of the matrix element in a power series of ν/ c and h ̵ ω/μc 2 . In each term of this series the potential between the scattered particles occurs explicitly. As an application of this formalism we calculate the low energy neutron-proton bremsstrahlung for a square well and a square well plus hard-core nuclear potential fitting the same low energy scattering parameters. The result is that the two potentials give the same bremsstrahlung to within a few percent as expected. In fact, we give a shape-independent expression for the low energy region. The cross section is found to be of the order 10 μb which should be measurable.