New Empirical Formula For Nucleon-Induced Nonelastic Cross Sections Based On Two Physical Effects

A simple universal parametrization of nucleon-induced nonelastic cross sections is presented for a wide range of targets that is valid for the entire energy range from zero to a few gigaelectronvolts. We review several early studies by Letaw et al., Pearlstein, Shen, Niita et al., and Tripathi et al., and our proposed approach differs completely from the formulas therein. The present formula is constructed based on recently discovered physical effects involving Coulomb repulsion and the discrete-level constraint and is based on the assumption that cross sections are continuous in both incident energies and targets. Our formula is given by a set of smooth functions of the mass number, which differs from the best formula to date by Tripathi et al. To compare our formula precisely with that by Tripathi et al., we proposed the relative error index, which indicates the relative error between experimental data and predicted values. For the C-12, Al-27, Fe-56, Ag-nat (nat)cd , (nat)sn, Au-197, and Pb-208 targets used in this paper, the corresponding relative error indices show clearly that our formula is superior to that by Tripathi et al.