A Numerical Algorithm for Nuclear Reaction in Deuterium-Tritium Plasma

Abstract

Rates of neutron production in deuterium-tritium (D-T) plasmas below the temperature of 100 keV have been widely studied with analytical cross sections based on nuclear physics. In the present work, a new algorithm of numerical simulation using the latest nuclear database ENDF/B-VII, discrete ordinate (S_N) method, and Monte Carlo methods was developed to describe nuclear reactions in D-T plasma. Compared with the method that used analytical cross section, this new method can predict the nuclear reaction in plasma to several hundreds of kilo-electron-volts and has the potential to give information about directionality of the neutron flux and other interesting nuclear reactions, if needed.

Keywords:

• Deuterium-tritium plasma
• neutron source
• nuclear database
• numerical algorithm

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the program ZK16-03-49 of the National University of Defense Technology, the National Natural Science Foundation for Young Scientists of China (grant number 11505287), and the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province, China (grant number 2018JJ2473). All authors wished to express special thanks to Songlin Liu for valuable discussion.