Neutron-induced fission cross section of ²³⁴U measured at the CERN n_TOF facility

Abstract

The neutron-induced fission cross section of ²³⁴U has been measured at the CERN n_TOF facility relative to the standard fission cross section of ²³⁵U from 20 keV to 1.4 MeV and of ²³⁸U from 1.4 to 200 MeV. A fast ionization chamber (FIC) was used as a fission fragment detector with a detection efficiency of no less than 97%. The high instantaneous flux and the low background characterizing the n_TOF facility resulted in wide-energy-range data (0.02 to 200 MeV), with high energy resolution, high statistics, and systematic uncertainties bellow 3%. Previous investigations around the energy of the fission threshold revealed structures attributed to β-vibrational levels, which have been confirmed by the present measurements. Theoretical calculations have been performed, employing the TALYS code with model parameters tuned to fairly reproduce the experimental data.