IMPROVED THERMAL SCATTERING DATA PREPARATION
Name
epjconf_physor2020_09027.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.51 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
d3f5c69a6250e8b5689556d0ceeb25f4
Author(s)
Trainer, Amelia
Forget, Benoit
Conlin, Jeremy
Date Issued
2021
Journal
EPJ Web of Conferences
Publisher
EDP Sciences
Citation
Trainer, Amelia, Forget, Benoit and Conlin, Jeremy. 2021. "IMPROVED THERMAL SCATTERING DATA PREPARATION." EPJ Web of Conferences, 247.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Convenient access to accurate nuclear data, particularly data describing low-energy neutrons, is crucial for trustworthy simulations of thermal nuclear systems. Obtaining the scattering kernel for thermal neutrons (i.e., neutrons with energy ~1 eV or less) can be a difficult problem, since the neutron energy is not sufficient to break molecular bonds, and thus the neutrons must often interact with a much larger structure. The “scattering law” S(α; β), which is a function of unitless momentum α and energy β transfer, is used to relate the material’s phonon frequency distribution to the scattering kernel. LEAPR (a module of NJOY) and GASKET are two nuclear data processing codes that can be used to prepare the scattering law and use different approaches to approximate the same equations. LEAPR uses the “phonon expansion method” which involves iterative convolution. Iteratively solving convolution integrals is an expensive calculation to perform (to ease this calculation, LEAPR uses trapezoidal integration for the convolution). GASKET uses a more direct approach that, while avoiding the iterative convolutions, can become numerically unstable for some α; β combinations. When both methods are properly converged, they tend to agree quite well. The agreement and departure from agreement is presented here.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1051/EPJCONF/202124709027
