Pre-equilibrium processes in the reactions of neutrons on59Co and93Nb

Abstract
The statistical multistep compound (SMC) theory of Feshbach, Kerman and Koonin (1980) is used to analyse the energy and angular distributions of 14 MeV neutrons inelastically scattered by 59Co and 93Nb. An acceptable fit is obtained to the whole energy spectrum provided the contributions from the (n,2n) and (n,pn) reactions, also calculated with the SMC formalism, are added at low energies. The theory also accounts well for the (n,p) cross sections. The sensitivity of the results to the level density parameters is investigated.