New study of various target neutron yields from spallation reactions using a high-energy proton beam

Abstract

The spallation target plays an important role in the construction of an accelerator-driven system. Its purpose is to generate a neutron flux produced by cascaded spallation reactions using heavy nuclei, the latter being bombarded by the high-intensity proton beam. In this study, we have examined several heavy materials, such as uranium, thorium, tungsten, tantalum, lead, bismuth and mercury. The aim of this is to optimise a high-intensity neutron flux to be useful in several fields of applications, such as medicine and transmutation of nuclear waste. In this paper, we have shown when the spallation target changes the neutron flux varies. For example, uranium and thorium two materials producing a very intense amount of neutrons followed by lead, tungsten, mercury and bismuth and lately tantalum. We found these results by the variation of the proton beams energy from 0.1 GeV to 3 GeV, then with the variation of the geometry. Finally, we validated this study with experimental and theoretical results.