Three decades of fast‐neutron experiments

EXPERIMENTS WITH NEUTRONS in the MeV region are important both for learning about properties of nuclei and for applications in nuclear technology; yet relatively few nuclear physicists work in this area. The reason may be that experiments with neutrons are more difficult than those with charged particles, because neutrons can neither be accelerated nor detected directly. Consequently the accuracy of fast‐neutron experiments is typically an order of magnitude poorer than that of charged‐particle experiments. This comparison partially reflects the enormous advances of recent years in charged‐particle experiments, particularly with solid‐state detectors.