Nuclear Cross Section Measurements at Crocker Nuclear Laboratory

The vast majority of nuclear physics simulations are dependent on the National Nuclear Database, maintained at Brookhaven National Lab, and these in turn are all based on published experimental measurements. Even today, there are gaps in this database in low energy ranges, which can be filled even by older machines. The cyclotron at Crocker Nuclear Laboratory at UC Davis is capable of accelerating protons, deuterons, or alpha particles to variable energies up to a maximum of 67 MeV for protons. We have developed a facility to perform nuclear cross section measurements using the stacked-target method, which allows us to exploit the energy loss through a stack of target and monitor foils to measure energy dependent cross sections in a single exposure. Daughter nuclei are assayed using a high purity germanium (HPGe) detector.