Correlations Among Compound-Nucleus Widths Near an Analogue Resonance

One of the basic assumptions of the statistical model of nuclear reactions is that the decay amplitudes to different channels are uncorrelated. This assumption is expected to be no longer valid in the presence of direct reactions. First experimental evidence for channel-channel correlations (CCC) in compound nuclear (CN) scattering has been found from a study of the inelastic scattering of protons at isobaric analogue resonances (IAR)1–4).