Search for Free Decay of Negative Pions in Water and Light Materials

We report on a search for the free decay component of pi- stopped in water and light materials. A non-zero value of this would be an indication of anomalous nu_e contamination to the nu_e and nu_mu_bar production at stopped-pion neutrino facilities. No free decay component of pi- was observed in water, Beryllium, and Aluminum, for which upper limits were established at 8.2E-4, 3.2E-3, and 7.7E-3, respectively

Anisotropy in the pion angular distribution of the reaction pp -> pp pi0 at 400 MeV

The reaction pp -> pp pi0 was studied with the WASA detector at the CELSIUS storage ring. The center of mass angular distribution of the pi0 was obtained by detection of the gamma decay products together with the two outgoing protons, and found to be anisotropic with a negative second derivative slope, in agreement with the theoretical predictions from a microscopic calculation.Comment: Revtex 4 style, 5 pages 7 figures, PACS numbers:13.60.Le, 13.75.Cs, 21.45.+v, 25.10.+

Role of heavy-meson exchange in pion production near threshold

Recent calculations of $s$-wave pion production have severely underestimated the accurately known $pp\rightarrow pp\pi^0$\ total cross section near threshold. In these calculations, only the single-nucleon axial-charge operator is considered. We have calculated, in addition to the one-body term, the two-body contributions to this reaction that arise from the exchange of mesons. We find that the inclusion of the scalar $\sigma$-meson exchange current (and lesser contributions from other mesons) increases the cross section by about a factor of five, and leads to excellent agreement with the data. The results are neither very sensitive to changes in the distorting potential that generates the $NN$ wave function, nor to different choices for the meson-nucleon form factors. We argue that $pp\rightarrow pp\pi^0$\ data provide direct experimental evidence for meson-exchange contributions to the axial current.Comment: 28 Pages, IU-NTC #93-0

A Secondary Flow Effect on the Heat and Mass Transfer Processes in the Finned Rod Bundles of Gas-cooled Reactors

In nuclear power engineering a need to justify an operability of products and their components is of great importance. In high-temperature gas reactors, the critical element affecting the facility reliability is the fuel rod cladding, which in turn leads to the need to gain knowledge in the field of gas dynamics and heat transfer in the reactor core and to increase the detail of the calculation results. For the time being, calculations of reactor core are performed using the proven techniques of per-channel calculations, which show good representativeness and count rate. However, these techniques require additional experimental studies to describe correctly the inter-channel exchange, which, being taken into account, largely affects the pattern of the temperature fields in the region under consideration. Increasingly more relevant and demandable are numerical simulation methods of fluid and gas dynamics, as well as of heat exchange, which consist in the direct solution of the system of differential equations of mass balance, kinetic moment, and energy. Calculation of reactor cores or rod bundles according these techniques does not require additional experimental studies and allows us to obtain the local distributions of flow characteristics in the bundle and the flow characteristics that are hard to measure in the physical experiment.The article shows the calculation results and their analysis for an infinite rod lattice of the reactor core. The results were obtained by the technique of modelling one rod of a regular lattice using the periodic boundary conditions, followed by translating the results to the neighbouring rods. In channels of complex shape, there are secondary flows caused by changes in the channel geometry along the flow and directed across the main front of the flow. These secondary flows in the reactor cores with rods spaced by the winding wire lead to a redistribution of the coolant along the channel section, which in turn results in a heat flow from the more heated rods to the less heated ones. The largest vector values of the transversal velocity are observed near the rod surface immediately behind the fin that passes in the section under consideration. These features lead to the exchange of mass and heat between the conjugate cells of the bundle of rods. The distribution of the transversal velocity in the gap between the rods has a periodic saw-tooth pattern, which can be justified by the fact that the fins pass periodically through the gap. Thus, the maximum of the flow is achieved immediately after passing the fins through the gap when the maximum transverse velocities can be observed directly behind the fins, and the minimum occurs when the fins move to meet each other, and before the fins in the gap is formed a region with the minimum values of the transversal velocity.</p