INELASTICITY CORRECTIONS IN THERMAL-NEUTRON SCATTERING BY MOLECULES USING A SYNTHETIC (INCOHERENT) SCATTERING FUNCTION

Recently a synthetic scattering law has been developed to describe the interaction of thermal neutrons with molecular gases. Although this function does not contain a detailed description of the atomic motions in the molecular unit (nor pair correlations), the main features of the molecular dynamics are retained through the introduction of effective quantities which are directly related to the basic properties of the system. In this work we present evaluations of inelasticity corrections using the synthetic model for both reactor and pulsed neutron diffraction experiments. Predictions are made of differential cross sections (self component) for light and heavy water and these are compared with available experimental results.