The field of nuclear reactions focuses on the description of the physical processes that occur when a particle or an atomic nucleus collides with another nucleus, often referred to as a target. The fundamental observable associated with these collisions is the cross section, which gives the probability that the particles in the incident beam will interact with the target nucleus. This effective cross section is subdivided into several reaction channels that could describe as well a simple elastic scattering as complex processes involving an internal reorganization of the target nucleus (inelastic scattering, radiative capture, gamma ray emission, (n, xn) reactions, light particle break-up, transfer reactions, nuclear transfer reactions, nuclear fission, etc).

The LMCE focuses its research efforts on the theory of reactions induced by neutrons and other light particles (deuteron, triton…), in an energy range from keV to a hundred MeV. The objective of these studies is to predict as precisely as possible cross sections and other observables associated with a wide spectrum of nuclear reactions and for a wide range of nuclei. This requires the development of optical reaction potentials, studies on the mechanisms of direct and pre-equilibrium reactions or an improvement of our description of slower reactions, involving a compound nucleus. This work leads to collaborations with the University of Chile (Santiago, Chile) or the Los Alamos National Laboratory (Los Alamos NM, USA).

In addition, our experimental teams are conducting measurement campaigns to better characterize certain cross sections of interest (e.g. (n,xn) reactions) as well as structural properties such as gamma force functions and excited level densities that play a key role in our understanding of nuclear reactions. These measurements leverage the NENUPHAR particle accelerator of the CEA, DAM as well as the NFS beam line at GANIL.