Measurements have been made on the energy and angular distributions of the charged particles from disintegration ‘stars’ produced in the silver and bromine nuclei of photographic emulsions exposed to cosmic radiation. The observations extended over a wide range of excitation energies (100 to 700 MeV). The energy spectra and angular distributions of the protons can be explained in all cases by simple evaporation theory. This energy distribution shows also a high-energy tail consisting of direct knock-on protons and slow mesons. At high excitation energies the α-particles exhibit collimation effects which are probably due to localized ‘boiling’ or a form of fission.
The angular distributions of the photoneutrons produced by 70-Mev. X-rays in seven elements have been measured with a zinc sulphide – lucite scintillation detector. For the heavy elements the distributions are essentially isotropic, indicating the predominance of the evaporation process, while for the light elements there is also an anisotropic component peaked at 90°. The energy distributions of the photoneutrons produced in copper and lead targets have been determined with nuclear emulsions. It is shown that most of the neutrons can be attributed to an evaporation process which is governed by a constant nuclear temperature, the temperature found for copper being 1.2 Mev., and for lead being 1.0 Mev. A high-energy tail on the energy distributions is attributed to direct interactions.
A fair knowledge of the atmospheric muon distributions at Earth is a prerequisite for the simulations of cosmic ray setups and rare event search detectors. A modified power law is proposed for atmospheric muon energy distribution which gives a good description of the cosmic muon data in low as well as high energy regime. Using this distribution, analytical forms for zenith angle [Formula: see text] distribution are obtained. Assuming a flat Earth, it leads to the [Formula: see text] form where it is shown that the parameter [Formula: see text] is nothing but the power of the energy distribution. Exact analytical function is obtained for inclined trajectory of muon. A new closed form for zenith angle distribution is obtained without assuming a flat Earth and which gives an improved description of the data at all angles even above [Formula: see text]. These distributions are tested with the available atmospheric muon data of energy and angular distributions. The parameters of these distributions can be used to characterize the cosmic muon data as a function of energy, angle and altitude.
An analysis of 271 collimated pairs of alpha particles of comparable ranges emitted from interactions of 20 GeV/c protons with the heavy nuclei of emulsion has been made; ~90% of these can be interpreted as due to the decay of 8Be in its ground state. The mean Q value (~0.094 MeV) obtained from the analysis is in good agreement with the expected Q value of the reaction 8Be → 24He. The energy and angular distributions of the 8Be nuclei have been compared with the predictions of the nuclear "evaporation" theory. The parameter values for good fit are found to be: T = 10 MeV, V = 10 MeV, and β = 0.015.
The distributions in angle and energy for charged particles emitted from polycrystalline platinum bombarded with ions of hydrogen, sodium, potassium and some hydrocarbons, have been measured, in continuation of previous work (Cawthron, Cotterell & Oliphant 1969
a
,
b
, parts I and II; 1970, part III) to lower energies. Composite spectra are presented, including ions of both signs. The flux of emitted charged particles, under hydrogen ion bombardment, is shown to contain approximately equal numbers of protons and H¯ ions, except at the lowest bombarding energies, where the latter apparently predominate. Scattering in all cases is shown to increase with bombarding energy over the range covered, the increase being near linear for hydrogen and very rapid for alkalimetal ions. In all cases the total emission of charged particles is very small at the lowest bombarding energies employed.
Nuclear disintegrations produced by cosmic rays