Publications
Simulation of moderated plutonium neutron multiplicity measurements
The purpose of this work is to improve detection methods that can reliably identify special nuclear material (SNM). One method that can be used to identify special nuclear material is neutron multiplicity analysis. This method detects multiple time-correlated neutrons released from a fission event in the SNM. This work investigates the ability of the software code MCNP-PoliMi to simulate neutron multiplicity measurements from a highly moderated SNM source. A measurement of a 4.5-kg alpha-phase metal plutonium sphere surrounded by up to 6 inches of polyethylene shells has recently been performed by Sandia National Laboratories personnel at the Nevada Test Site. A post-processing code was developed to account for dead-time effects within the detector and to determine the neutron multiplicity distributions for various time intervals. With the distributions calculated, the Feynman-Y can be determined. The Feynman-Y is a metric that measures the level of correlation present in a sample. At this time MCNP-PoliMi is able predict the Feynman-Y within 10% of the measured value.