A New Format for Handling Nuclear Data

Abstract

The ASCII ENDF format for nuclear data has been used for four decades. It is practical for human inspection and portability, but it is not very effective for manipulating and displaying the data or for using them in Monte-Carlo applications. In this paper we present a prototype of a nuclear data manipulation package (TNudy) based on the ROOT system (http://root.cern.ch). The ROOT object-oriented C++ framework is the de-facto standard in high energy and nuclear physics since ten years. Starting from the ENDF format, the data is stored in machine-portable binary format. Root files also offer a powerful direct access capability to their different sections and compressibility upon writing, minimising the disk occupancy. ROOT offers a complete library of visualisation and mathematical routines and the Virtual Monte-Carlo system, which allows running different transport Monte-Carlo (Geant 4, Geant 3) with common scoring and geometry modellers, which comes as part of ROOT. ROOT contains isotope decay data and the possibility to describe the evolution of isotopic vectors via Bateman equations. The addition of the ENDF information to Root will allow the development of a transport code for low energy neutrons and other combination of projectile target, either stand-alone as part of the Root system or in combination with some of the other Monte-Carlo systems within the framework of the Virtual Monte-Carlo.