Investigation of α-particle scattering from Mg as a test of hauser-feshbach calculations in the continuum region

The elastic and inelastic scattering of α-partieles by ²⁴Mg is investigated at bombarding energies between 15.4 and 19.1 MeV. Particular attention is given to the analysis of the inelastic scattering to the 3⁺ unnatural-parity state at 5.22 MeV. Both energy-averaged angular distributions and fine-energy-resolution excitation functions are used in the analysis. It is found that the inelastic scattering to the (3⁺, 5.22 MeV) state may be interpreted as pure compound nucleus scattering. This fact is used to investigate whether the incoherent addition of a compound nucleus cross section and a direct cross section, as has been done in recent analyses, is a realistic way to describe energy-averaged scattering data which contain both direct and compound contributions.