Measurement of Neutron Energy Distributions From p+Be Reaction at 20 MeV Using Threshold Activation Foils

Energy distributions of neutrons emitted from the interaction of 20 MeV protons incident on a thick Be target were estimated at two angles (0° and 90°) with respect to the incident beam using activation foils as threshold detectors. A recently developed unfolding code GAMCD based on Genetic Algorithm and Monte Carlo methods was used to estimate the neutron spectra by unfolding the counts obtained from the activation foils. These results were compared with the unfolding codes, MAXED and GRAVEL. In the GAMCD code, a guess spectrum as a-priori information need not be provided as input unlike in MAXED and GRAVEL. Results obtained from all these codes matched each other reasonably well. Out of 30 reactions studied experimentally only the selected 15 were found sufficient to generate acceptable spectra in the case of neutrons emitted from the p+Be reaction at 20 MeV. A peak in the energy distributions around 3 MeV at both the measured angles is contributed by the three body breakup process while a broad hump between 6 MeV and 10 MeV only in the forward direction suggests contribution from the pre-equilibrium emissions from the
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Be(p, n)
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B channel, which also contributes to the small peak observed around 15 MeV. The code GAMCD was found to perform satisfactorily for the present data set.