Over the last several years, the surrogate reaction technique has been successfully employed to extract ($n,f$) and ($n,\gamma$) cross sections in the actinide region to a precision of $\sim$5$\%$ and $\sim$20$\%$, respectively. However, attempts to apply the technique in the rare earth region have shown large (factors of 2–3) discrepancies between the directly measured ($n,\gamma$) and extracted surrogate cross sections. One possible origin of this discrepancy lies in differences between the initial spin-parity population distribution in the neutron induced and surrogate reactions. To address this issue, the angular momentum transfer to the high excitation energy quasicontinuum region in Gd nuclei has been investigated. The ($p,d$) and ($p,t$) reactions on ${}^{154,158}$Gd at a beam energy of 25 MeV were utilized. Assuming a single dominant angular momentum transfer component, the measured angular distribution for the ($p,d$) reactions is well reproduced by distorted-wave Born approximation (DWBA) calculations for $\Delta L=4$ $\hslash$ transfer, whereas the ($p,t$) reactions are better characterized by $\Delta L=5$ $\hslash$. A linear combination of DWBA calculations, weighted according to a distribution of $L$ transfers (peaking around $\Delta L=4$–5 $\hslash$), is in excellent agreement with the experimental angular distributions.

• Received 17 April 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.85.051304