The Baghdad Atlas: A relational database of inelastic neutron-scattering (n,n′γ) data

Abstract

Abstract A relational database has been developed based on the original ( n , n ′ γ ) work carried out by A.\xa0M.\xa0Demidov et al., at the Nuclear Research Institute in Baghdad, Iraq (Demidov et\xa0al., 1978) for 105 independent measurements comprising 76 elemental samples of natural composition and 29 isotopically-enriched samples. The information from this Atlas includes: γ -ray energies and relative intensities; nuclide and level data corresponding to the residual nucleus and meta data associated with the target sample that allows for the extraction of the flux-weighted ( n , n ′ γ ) cross sections for a given transition relative to a defined value. The optimized angular-distribution-corrected fast-neutron flux-weighted partial γ -ray cross section for the production of the 846.8-keV 2 1 + → 0 gs + γ -ray transition in 56Fe, determined to be 〈 σ γ 〉 = 143 ( 29 ) \xa0mb, is used for this purpose. However, different values for the adopted cross section can be readily implemented to accommodate user preference based on revised determinations of this quantity. The Atlas ( n , n ′ γ ) data has been compiled into a series of CSV-style ASCII data sets and a suite of Python scripts have been developed to build and install the database locally. The database can then be accessed directly through the SQLite engine, or using alternative methods such as the Jupyter Notebook Python-browser interface. Several examples exploiting different interaction methodologies are distributed with the complete software package.