Experiment on neutron production differential cross sections induced by 0.8, 1.5 and 3.0 GeV protons

Neutron production double differential cross sections induced by 0.8, 1.5 and 3.0 GeV protons on C, Al, Fe, In and Pb targets were measured with two different sizes of NE213 liquid scintillators by time-of-flight technic. Such effects as time-walk of constant fraction discriminators and multiple-scattering in thick targets were taken into account at data corrections. Although the experiments were performed with a typical flight path length of 1 m, the cross sections were successfully obtained with acceptable uncertainties. The experimental results were compared with INCE model calculations. The calculations generally reproduced the experimental data at 0.8 GeV-incident protons. For incident protons above GeV, however, the calculations overestimated the present experimental data in the neutron energy region from 10 to 30 MeV. It was found that improvements of the INCE model are required for incident proton energies above 1 GeV.