The extrapolated-efficiency method, a new technique to determine the detection efficiency in experiments based on the surrogate-reaction method

The surrogate-reaction method is an indirect technique to extract neutron-induced cross-sections of short-lived nuclei. In the last years several experiments have been performed to investigate whether this technique can be applied to infer radiative-capture cross-sections. A major difficulty in this type of measurements is the determination of the gamma-cascade detection efficiency. The pulse-height weighting technique (PHWT) has been previously used to determine this quantity in surrogate experiments. In this work, we present a new method to determine the gamma-cascade detection efficiency in the vicinity of the neutron-separation energy that is much simpler than the PHWT. We also investigate the possibility to apply this new technique in standard experiments using neutron beams.