Secondary Particle Spectra from the Interaction of 30- to 340-MeV Protons on Complex Nuclei: Experimental Data and Comparison with Theory

Abstract

A few serious discrepancies or anomalies exist in the measured neutron and proton spectra from the interaction of protons with nuclei in the 100-MeV energy region. These are: (1) the existence of a pronounced quasi-elastic neutron peak at small forward angles for 140-MeV incident protons and the unexplained absence of such a peak for 100-MeV protons; (2) a target-mass dependence of the measured neutron spectra at small angles from 160-MeV protons that is inconsistent with the 140-MeV data; and (3) an inconsistency in the shapes of some of the measured secondary-proton spectra. These discrepancies are illustrated, and comparisons with the theoretical predictions of an intranuclear-cascade calculation are made. However, the existence of the experimental discrepancies makes it difficult to evaluate the validity of any theoretical model which is used in the prediction of these data; therefore, additional experiments are needed.