Energy Correlation of Prompt Fission Neutrons

Chalmers University of Technology, Division of Nuclear Engineering, Göteborg, Sweden, SE-41296

^a e-mail: zsolt@nephy.chalmers.se
^b e-mail: imre@chalmers.se

Published online: 15 March 2016

Abstract

In all cases where neutron fluctuations in a branching process (such as in multiplicity measurements) are treated in an energy dependent description, the energy correlations of the branching itself (energy correlations of the fission neutrons) need to be known. To date, these are not known from experiments. Such correlations can be theoretically and numerically derived by modelling the details of the fission process. It was suggested earlier that the fact that the prompt neutrons are emitted from the moving fission targets, will influence their energy and angular distributions in the lab system, which possibly induces correlations. In this paper the influence of the neutron emission process from the moving targets on the energy correlations is investigated analytically and via numerical simulations. It is shown that the correlations are generated by the random energy and direction distributions of the fission fragments. Analytical formulas are derived for the two-point energy distributions, and quantitative results are obtained by Monte-Carlo simulations. The results lend insight into the character of the two-point distributions, and give quantitative estimates of the energy correlations, which are generally small.