Paper award of Atomic Energy Society of Japan in 2021; JENDL/DEU-2020: deuteron nuclear data library for design studies of accelerator-based neutron sources

Nakayama, Shinsuke  

The content of the paper that received the Paper Award of Atomic Energy Society of Japan in 2021 is outlined. Although the use of deuteron accelerator-based neutron sources has been proposed in various fields, deuteron nuclear database accurate enough to be applied to the design study of such neutron sources had not been developed. Under these situations, we had developed a deuteron nuclear database, JENDL/DEU-2020. It contains evaluated deuteron nuclear data for light nuclei (Li, Be, C), which are candidates for deuteron beam irradiation targets of the neutron sources. Evaluation of JENDL/DEU-2020 was performed by using the code system DEURACS with further modifications. In order to validate the accuracy of the database, simulations using the particle transport code were performed under various conditions with different target nuclides and incident deuteron energies, and the results were compared with the available experimental data. As a result, it was found that JENDL/DEU-2020 significantly improves the prediction accuracy of experimental data under a wider range of conditions than other nuclear reaction databases or the nuclear reaction models implemented in transport calculation codes.