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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
S. N. Purohit, A. K. Rajagopal
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 13 | Number 3 | July 1962 | Pages 250-260
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE62-A26160
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A general mathematical formalism for the energy transfer moments and their associated integrals, useful in the study of neutron thermalization, is presented. This formalism has been employed to obtain these quantities for the “general Doppler approximation” case, which represents a large number of approximations that belong to the Doppler class. An exact formula for M2 (the second energy transfer moment weighted by the Maxwellian distribution) is given in terms of binding parameters for the general Doppler case. A new, useful Doppler approximation, which satisfies the Detailed Balance theorem and is based upon the Debye-Waller factor and the specific heat integral, is also formulated. A comparative study has been undertaken of this and three other previously known Doppler cases (the monatomic gas model, the effective temperature, and the Krieger-Nelkin approximations for rotating molecules) in terms of the validity of the Detailed Balance theorem and the asymptotic scattering behavior. Numerical results based upon the Debye frequency distribution of vibrational modes in the Doppler approximation are presented.