Year
2010
Abstract
Nuclear resonance fluorescence (NRF) is of particular interest to the detection of special nuclear material (SNM) where isotopic characterization is paramount. NRF allows for specific isotope identification by exploiting the nuclear structure of atoms, and has the potential to be a powerful active interrogation technique. The focus here is on an aspect of the simulation side of developing NRF interrogation technology. To our knowledge the cross-sections for nuclear resonance absorption do not exist in any publicly released version MCNP. Therefore, a novel method is applied here to reproduce the NRF signal from measured results obtained by Bertozzi et al. Also, there are large uncertainties in the measured NRF cross sections, up to 34 % in certain cases. Such large uncertainties must be considered when comparing the experimental results to the simulated results that are based on the measured cross sections. The uncertainties were incorporated into the simulation method to determine what effect they would have on the simulation results. Using the uncertainties in the cross section data, it was shown that the experimental results agree with the simulated results within the error bars generated by incorporating the cross section uncertainties into the simulation method.