Status Report on the WPEC / Subgroup A Activities in 2004 - 2005

The primary goal of the long-term Subgroup A is to promote collaboration and exchange among nuclear reaction code developers internationally. This document reports on the Subgroup A activities in 2004-2005, both in view of individual codes (TALYS, EMPIRE, GNASH/McGNASH) development, and in regard to the common development of the ModLib library. Notably, several important new code releases were made this year: the TALYS code v.0.64 was released in January 2005; a new and significant update of the EMPIRE code (v.2.19) was released in late March 2005; and the first version (v.0.1) of the ModLib library was also released in December 2004. Finally, the McGNASH code is still in development at LANL and a beta-version is expected to be released by the end of 2005. 1 Status of existing nuclear reaction codes 1.1 EMPIRE-2.19, Lodi Lot of work has been invested over last two years into improvement and adding new functionalities to the EMPIRE code. Extensive testing has been carried out recently leading to the beta version (EMPIRE-2.19, Lodi), released by the end of March 2005. It includes following new features and improvements: • multi-modal fission through multi-humped barriers, • exciton model for cluster emission (Iwamoto-Harada), • suite of γ-ray strength functions from RIPL-2, • photo-nuclear reactions, • reactions on excited targets, • new algorithm for calculation of exclusive spectra and recoils, • simultaneous calculations of Coupled-Channel and DWBA contributions, • merging resonance parameters into the final ENDF file, • improved ENDF formatting and its verification, • matured version of the new GUI, • GUI assisted fitting of optical model parameters,