Total nuclear photon absorption cross sections for some light elements

Abstract

Absolute nuclear photon absorption cross sections have been measured for the elements Li, Be, C, O, Al, Si and Ca from 10 MeV up to photon energies beyond the meson production threshold. Magnetic Compton spectrometers and a bremsstrahlung spectrum with fixed end-point energy were used. The cross sections show structure in the region of the giant resonance and fall off smoothly towards higher energies. In the giant resonance region recent 1p-1h calculations are in poor agreement with these measurements except for one calculation for carbon, which included low lying excited states of the residual mass-11 system. The cross section in the intermediate region (40 to 140 MeV) can be described by the quasideuteron model with the density of deuteron-like structures taken as 8 NZ/ A. The moments of the measured cross sections are compared with sum rule predictions. The integrated cross sections from 10 MeV up to the meson production threshold (140 MeV) exceed the classical dipole sum by a factor of 1.4 to 2.