A correlated study between effective total macroscopic cross sections and effective energies for neutron beams with continuous spectra

Two practically useful quantities have been introduced to characterize a continuous-energy-spectrum neutron beam and to describe transmission phenomena of the beam in the field of quantitative neutron radiography. These quantities are the effective energy instead of a peak energy or a mean energy of the spectrum and an effective total macroscopic (ETM) cross section instead of a total macroscopic (TM) cross section as defined for a monochromatic energy. eutron beams have been used to measure ETM cross sections at effective energies of 29.8, 17.2, 9.8 meV, and at the In resonance energy of 1.46 eV. Results are studied as a function of estimated effective energy, where the effective energy was estimated by a beam quality indicator (BQI) which has been proposed recently. Validity of ETM cross sections as a function of the effective energy is discussed and correlated with recent nuclear data.