Correlated Production and Analog Transport of Fission Neutrons and Photons using Fission Models FREYA, FIFRELIN and the Monte Carlo Code TRIPOLI-4® .

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Nuclear and Chemical Sciences Division P.O. Box 808 Livermore, California 94551–0808 U.S.A. Verbeke2@llnl.gov
Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives Université Paris-Saclay F-91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, cedex France Odile.Petit@cea.fr
Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives F-13108 Saint-Paul-lés-Durance France Olivier.Litaize@cea.fr Abdelhazize.Chebboubi@cea.fr

Published online: 10 January 2018

Abstract

Fission modeling in general-purpose Monte Carlo transport codes often relies on average nuclear data provided by international evaluation libraries. As such, only average fission multiplicities are available and correlations between fission neutrons and photons are missing. Whereas uncorrelated fission physics is usually sufficient for standard reactor core and radiation shielding calculations, correlated fission secondaries are required for specialized nuclear instrumentation and detector modeling. For coincidence counting detector optimization for instance, precise simulation of fission neutrons and photons that remain correlated in time from birth to detection is essential. New developments were recently integrated into the Monte Carlo transport code TRIPOLI-4 to model fission physics more precisely, the purpose being to access event-by-event fission events from two different fission models: FREYA and FIFRELIN. TRIPOLI-4 simulations can now be performed, either by connecting via an API to the LLNL fission library including FREYA, or by reading external fission event data files produced by FIFRELIN beforehand. These new capabilities enable us to easily compare results from Monte Carlo transport calculations using the two fission models in a nuclear instrumentation application. In the first part of this paper, broad underlying principles of the two fission models are recalled. We then present experimental measurements of neutron angular correlations for ²⁵²Cf(sf) and ²⁴⁰Pu(sf). The correlations were measured for several neutron kinetic energy thresholds. In the latter part of the paper, simulation results are compared to experimental data. Spontaneous fissions in ²⁵²Cf and ²⁴⁰Pu are modeled by FREYA or FIFRELIN. Emitted neutrons and photons are subsequently transported to an array of scintillators by TRIPOLI-4 in analog mode to preserve their correlations. Angular correlations between fission neutrons obtained independently from these TRIPOLI-4 simulations, using either FREYA or FIFRELIN, are compared to experimental results. For ²⁴⁰Pu(sf), the measured correlations were used to tune the model parameters.