Thermal neutron captures on d and 3He

Phys Rev Lett. 2010 Dec 3;105(23):232502. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.232502. Epub 2010 Nov 30.

Abstract

We report on a study of the nd and n(3)He radiative captures at thermal neutron energies, using wave functions obtained from either chiral or conventional two- and three-nucleon realistic potentials with the hyperspherical-harmonics method, and electromagnetic currents derived in chiral effective field theory up to one loop. The predicted nd and n(3)He cross sections are in good agreement with data, but exhibit a significant dependence on the input Hamiltonian. A comparison is also made between these and new results for the nd and n(3)He cross sections obtained in the conventional framework for both potentials and currents.