Experimental study of photoneutron spectra from tantalum, tungsten, and bismuth targets for 16.6 MeV polarized photons

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The double differential cross-section (DDX) of photoneutron production via the photonuclear reaction on tantalum, tungsten, and bismuth for 16.6 MeV linearly polarized photon beam were measured using the time-of-flight method at the NewSUBARU-BL01 facility. Polarized photons were obtained by the laser Compton backscattering (LCS) technique. Two distinct components were observed on the spectra: the low-energy component up to 4 MeV and the high-energy above 4 MeV. The angular distribution of the low-energy component was isotropic, whereas the high-energy was distributed anisotropically due to the polarization effect of the polarized incident photons. These distributions were similar to the previous studies on the Au target. The DDX energy integration was calculated and compared between the three targets. These integration values on Ta and W were comparable and around 1.5 times smaller than those on Bi, no matter the detection angles. The high-energy component accounted for about 50% of the neutrons measured for all three targets.