Study of the Photon Strength Functions for Gadolinium Isotopes with the DANCE Array

The gadolinium isotopes are interesting for reactor applications as well as for medicine and astrophysics. The gadolinium isotopes have some of the largest neutron capture cross sections. As a consequence they are used in the control rod in reactor fuel assembly. From the basic science point of view, there are seven stable isotopes of gadolinium with varying degrees of deformation. Therefore they provide a good testing ground for the study of deformation dependent structure such as the scissors mode. Decay gamma rays following neutron capture on Gd isotopes are detected by the DANCE array, which is located at flight path 14 at the Lujan Neutron Scattering Center at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The high segmentation and close packing of the detector array enable gamma‐ray multiplicity measurements. The calorimetric properties of the DANCE array coupled with the neutron time‐of‐flight technique enables one to gate on a specific resonance of a specific isotope in the time‐of‐flight spectrum and obtain the...