STATISTICAL THEORY OF NUCLEAR REACTIONS AS A COMMUNICATION PROBLEM .2. CONSTANT AND 1-LEVEL RESONATING AMPLITUDE

The formalism developed in part I of this paper is applied to a simple statistical theory of nuclear reactions. The starting point is the Breit-Wigner expansion in which some terms are considered as describing a simple type of excitation, the parameters of which are to be determined from the experimental data, whereas the other terms are associated with compound nucleus levels and treated as a random noise. Two particular cases are treated in detail: the case of an energy independent amplitude, and that of a single isolated resonance. Expressions are derived for the most probable values of the parameters defining these amplitudes for a given set of observed cross sections, as well as for the statistical uncertainty on these amplitudes introduced by the compound nucleus noise. © 1968.