Thermal-to-fusion neutron convertor and Monte Carlo coupled simulation of deuteron/triton transport and secondary products generation

Abstract

Thermal-to-fusion neutron convertor has being studied in China Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP). Current Monte Carlo codes, such as MCNP and GEANT, are inadequate when applied in this multi-step reactions problems. A Monte Carlo tool RSMC (Reaction Sequence Monte Carlo) has been developed to simulate such coupled problem, from neutron absorption, to charged particle ionization and secondary neutron generation. “Forced particle production” variance reduction technique has been implemented to improve the calculation speed distinctly by making deuteron/triton induced secondary product plays a major role. Nuclear data is handled from ENDF or TENDL, and stopping power from SRIM, which described better for low energy deuteron/triton interactions. As a validation, accelerator driven mono-energy 14MeV fusion neutron source is employed, which has been deeply studied and includes deuteron transport and secondary neutron generation. Various parameters, including fusion neutron angle distribution, average neutron energy at different emission directions, differential and integral energy distributions, are calculated with our tool and traditional deterministic method as references. As a result, we present the calculation results of convertor with RSMC, including conversion ratio of 1mm 6LiD with a typical thermal neutron (Maxwell spectrum) incidence, and fusion neutron spectrum, which will be used for our experiment.