Development of a reaction ejectile sampling algorithm to recover kinematic correlations from inclusive cross-section data in Monte-Carlo particle transport simulations

Abstract

A new phenomenological approach is developed to reproduce the stochastic distributions of secondary particle energy and angle with conservation of momentum and energy in reactions ejecting more than one ejectiles using inclusive cross-section data. The summation of energy and momentum in each reaction is generally not conserved in Monte-Carlo particle transport simulation based on the inclusive cross-sections because the particle correlations are lost in the inclusive cross-section data. However, the energy and angular distributions are successfully reproduced by randomly generating numerous sets of secondary particle configurations which are compliant with the conservation laws, and sampling one set considering their likelihood. This developed approach was applied to simulation of (n,xn) reactions (x≥2) of various targets and to other reactions such as (n,np) and (n,2nα). The calculated secondary particle energy and angular distributions were compared with those of the original inclusive cross-section data to validate the algorithm. The calculated distributions reproduce the trend of original cross-section data considerably well especially in case of heavy targets. The developed algorithm is beneficial to improve the accuracy of event-by-event analysis in particle transport simulation.