Fluctuations of Nuclear Reaction Widths

The fluctuations of the neutron reduced widths from the resonance region of intermediate and heavy nuclei have been analyzed by a statistical procedure which is based on the method of maximum likelihood. It is found that a chi-squared distribution with one degree of freedom is quite consistent with the data while a chi-squared distribution with two degrees of freedom (an exponential distribution) is not. The former distribution corresponds to a Gaussian distribution for the reduced-width amplitude, and a plausibility argument is given for it which is based on the consideration of the matrix elements for neutron emission from the compound nucleus and of the central limit theorem of statistics. This argument also suggests that within the framework of the compound-nucleus theory all reduced-width amplitudes have Gaussian distributions, and that many of the distributions for the various channels may be independent. One consequence of the latter suggestion is that the total radiation width for a given spin state which is formed in neutron capture will be essentially constant, in agreement with some observations, because it is the sum of many partial radiation widths. The fluctuations of the provisional fission widths of U^235 are best described by a chisquared distribution with about 2 degrees of freedom, indicating that there are effectively only a few independently contributing fission channels.