EXPERIMENTAL AND THEORETICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE H-2(N, NNP) REACTION AND OF THE NEUTRON NEUTRON-SCATTERING LENGTH

An experimental and theoretical investigation of the neutron-deuteron break-up reaction is given. The kinematically overdetermined experiment was performed at an incident-neutron laboratory energy of 10.3 MeV at the multidetector neutron facility of the Erlangen Tandem Laboratory. Calculations based on AGS equations using a charge-dependent modification of the Paris potential were done within the W-matrix formalism. For some configurations, experimental data were corrected by folding the point-geometry calculations with the experimental resolutions. On the whole, the comparison between experiment and calculation shows good agreement, however, some discrepancies persist. From an analysis of the neutron-neutron final-state interaction peak at 13 MeV, a value of a(nn) = (-17.0 +/- 1.0) fm is extracted for the neutron-neutron scattering length.