Speaker
Description
Photonuclear reactions are sensitive to nuclear currents that are not accessible in pure hadronic processes and therefore, provide important insights to deepen our understanding of the few nucleon systems. However, the lack of kinematically-complete three-nucleon data remains a major hurdle in benchmarking the theoretical formalisms which are employed to model these few nucleon systems.
To that end, preparations are underway at the High-Intensity Gamma-Ray Source (HIγS) at the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL) to perform a kinematically-complete measurement of the tritium photodisintegration cross section. The proposed experiment will measure both two-body and three-body photodisintegration cross sections of tritium at incident photon energies below 30 MeV using the quasi-monoenergetic photon beam at HIγS.
The experiment will use a pressurized tritium gas target (200 psi) with thin aluminum windows (0.25 mm) for beam entrance and exit. Outgoing neutrons will be detected using an array of liquid organic scintillators. The gas target will be placed inside a secondary containment system equipped with tritium monitors during the experiment for radiation safety.
This experiment will be carried out by a collaboration of groups from TUNL and the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) at the University of Rochester. The target cells will be fabricated and pressure-tested at TUNL before being sent to LLE for tritium gas diffusion measurements using the tritium gas handling infrastructure at the LLE.
In this talk, we present the preparation and radiation safety infrastructure development for this experiment.
This research is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under Contracts DE-SC0022573 and DE-FG02-97ER41033.
