Effect of non-constant [GH]n([var epsilon]j) on neutron resonance broadening--II. Harmonic oscillator

Abstract

In the computation of Doppler broadening, the usual assumption used is to ignore the dependence of [GH]n(j) on the intermediate energy [var epsilon]j of the target atoms. This assumption has been examined for ideal gas targets and it was found that the effects of the j dependence are not significant. Here we study the j dependence for a target composed of harmonic oscillators. In this paper, we compute the resonance line shape, W(En), for harmonic oscillator targets taking into account the dependence of the neutron level width [GH]n on the intermediate state [GH]n(j). We compare the resonance line shapes for both constant and non-constant neutron level width. Our calculations show that the difference is not significant. Therefore, the non-constancy of [GH]n seems to be absolutely not important in calculating the broadening of neutron resonances.