Inelastic Nuclear Scattering

Last update: April 08, 2024

Intro

Inelastic nuclear scattering is the scattering in which the nucleus gets excited by one of the following

• a high energy particle like proton, neutron, electron, or even dark matter (2 to 2 scattering)
• a particle being absorbed by nucleus (2 to 1 scattering)

Shortly after the nucleus gets excited, it quickly (almost immediately) drop to ground state and meanwhile emits a photon. In experiment we catch this deexcitation photon as signal.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Such deexcitation photon has many advantages:

• Sharpness in energy spectrum: the photon has a defined energy, ie. it has a sharp energy spectrum, so it provides good statistics (statisical power, sensitivity, background reduction, etc)
• Documentation: there are enormous database and literacy that documented and studied the photon
• Efficiency: the detection of single-energy photon is efficient.

However, the disadvantages are

• Nuclear physics is complicated and challenging to compute
• Smaller rate than elastic scattering
• Narrower search range than elastic scattering

Nuclear database

The database collects the state energy, spin, parity, lifetime, rate and so on for almost every nucleus.

• https://www-nds.iaea.org/relnsd/vcharthtml/VChartHTML.html
• https://www.nndc.bnl.gov/nudat3/

My publications

These are my publications related to inelastic nuclear scattering

• Inelastic nuclear scattering from neutrinos and dark matter: theoretical calculations for inelastic neutrino-nucleus scattering and inelastic dark matter-nucleus scattering
• Probing the dark sector with nuclear transition photons: search dark matter by inelastic dark matter-nucleus scattering
• Axionlike particle production at beam dump experiments with distinct nuclear excitation lines: search axion by axion-nucleus absorption
• Exciting Prospects for Dark Matter at Large-Volume Neutrino Detectors: search dark matter by inelastic dark matter-nucleus scattering