The Angular Distribution of Neutrons Scattered from Deuterium below 2 MeV

Neutron elastic scattering measurements were carried out at the nELBE neutron time-of-flight facility at a 6 m flight path. Energies below 2 MeV were studied using a setup consisting of eight Li-6-glass detectors placed at nominal angles of 15 degrees and 165 degrees with respect to the incident neutron beam. A deuterated polyethylene sample with 99.999% enrichment in deuterium was used. These angles were chosen since an earlier study showed that the ratio of the differential cross section at these angles is the most sensitive to differences in evaluated files and model calculations. Accurate 165 degrees/15 degrees angle ratios were obtained. Above 1 MeV these are somewhat larger than given by ENDF/B-VII. Simultaneously the early day experiments using a proportional counter to infer angular distributions from deuterium recoil pulse height distributions are being studied through a new experiment with such a device at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB). At 500 keV this experiment favors ENDF/B-VII over JENDL-4.0, while at lower energies agreement with the data is similar.