Reliable neutron-induced-reaction cross sections of unstable nuclei are essential for nuclear astrophysics and applications but their direct measurement is often impossible. The surrogate-reaction method is one of the most promising alternatives to access these cross sections. In this work, we successfully applied the surrogate-reaction method to infer for the first time both the neutron-induced fission and radiative capture cross sections of ${}^{239}\mathrm{Pu}$ in a consistent manner from a single measurement. This was achieved by combining simultaneously measured fission and $\gamma$-emission probabilities for the ${}^{240}\mathrm{Pu}({}^4\mathrm{He},{}^4{\mathrm{He}}^{\prime })$ surrogate reaction with a calculation of the angular-momentum and parity distributions populated in this reaction. While other experiments measure the probabilities for some selected $\gamma$-ray transitions, we measure the $\gamma$-emission probability. This enlarges the applicability of the surrogate-reaction method.

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• Fission
• H & He induced nuclear reactions
• Models & methods for nuclear reactions
• Nuclear reactions
• Radiative capture
• Thermal & statistical models