Relativistic kinematics for photoneutron production in Monte Carlo transport calculations

Abstract

MC21 is a continuous-energy Monte Carlo radiation transport code for the calculation of the steady-state spatial distributions of reaction rates in three-dimensional models. The code supports neutron and photon transport in fixed source problems, as well as iterated-fission source (eigenvalue) neutron problems. The capability to simulate the production of photon-induced neutrons has been added to the code. In this paper, relativistic two-body kinematics are used to derive exact expressions for the secondary energy and angle distribution of photoneutrons. This treatment, implemented in MC21, is important in cases where the evaluated photonuclear data does not give an explicit energy distribution. Comparisons of the relativistic relations were made to approximations in MCNP5 and TRIPOLI-4, highlighting the magnitude of the error of those approximations.