  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 239Pu
in a consistent manner from a single measurement. This was achieved by
combining simultaneously-measured fission and gamma-emission probabilities for
the 240Pu(4He,4He') 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.
