Eur. Phys. J. A 11, 467-490 (2001)

Spallation neutron production and the current intra-nuclear cascade and transport codes

D. Filges¹, F. Goldenbaum¹, M. Enke², J. Galin³, C.-M. Herbach², D. Hilscher², U. Jahnke², A. Letourneau³, B. Lott³, R.-D. Neef¹, K. Nünighoff¹, N. Paul¹, A. Péghaire³, L. Pienkowski⁴, H. Schaal¹, U. Schröder⁵, G. Sterzenbach¹, A. Tietze⁶, V. Tishchenko², J. Toke⁵ and M. Wohlmuther<sup>1

1</sup>  Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Institut für Kernphysik, D-52425 Jülich, Germany
²  Hahn-Meitner Institut Berlin GmbH, Glienickerstr.100, D-14109 Berlin, Germany
³  GANIL, BP 5027, F-14076 Caen Cedex 5, France
⁴  Heavy Ion Laboratory Warsaw University, Pasteura 5a, 02-093 Warszawa, Poland
⁵  University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA
⁶  Universität Wuppertal, 42329 Wuppertal, Germany

f.goldenbaum@fz-juelich.de

(Received: 22 May 2001 / Revised version: 31 August 2001 Communicated by W. Henning)

Abstract
A recent renascent interest in energetic proton-induced production of neutrons originates largely from the inception of projects for target stations of intense spallation neutron sources, like the planned European Spallation Source (ESS), accelerator-driven nuclear reactors, nuclear waste transmutation, and also from the application for radioactive beams. In the framework of such a neutron production, of major importance is the search for ways for the most efficient conversion of the primary beam energy into neutron production. Although the issue has been quite successfully addressed experimentally by varying the incident proton energy for various target materials and by covering a huge collection of different target geometries -providing an exhaustive matrix of benchmark data-the ultimate challenge is to increase the predictive power of transport codes currently on the market. To scrutinize these codes, calculations of reaction cross-sections, hadronic interaction lengths, average neutron multiplicities, neutron multiplicity and energy distributions, and the development of hadronic showers are confronted with recent experimental data of the NESSI collaboration. Program packages like HERMES, LCS or MCNPX master the prevision of reaction cross-sections, hadronic interaction lengths, averaged neutron multiplicities and neutron multiplicity distributions in thick and thin targets for a wide spectrum of incident proton energies, geometrical shapes and materials of the target generally within less than 10% deviation, while production cross-section measurements for light charged particles on thin targets point out that appreciable distinctions exist within these models.

PACS
25.40.Sc - Spallation reactions.
24.10.Lx - Monte Carlo simulations (including hadron and parton cascades and string breaking models).
28.20.-v - Neutron physics.

© Società Italiana di Fisica, Springer-Verlag 2001