Generation of thermal scattering files with the CINEL code

Abstract

The CINEL code dedicated to generate the thermal neutron scattering files in ENDF-6 format for solid crystalline, free gas materials and liquid water is presented. Compared to the LEAPR module of the NJOY code, CINEL is able to calculate the coherent and incoherent elastic scattering cross sections for any solid crystalline materials. Specific material properties such as anharmonicity and texture can be taken into account in CINEL. The calculation of the thermal scattering laws can be accelerated by using graphics processing unit (GPU), which enables to remove the short collision time approximation for large values of momentum transfer. CINEL is able to generate automatically the grids of dimensionless momentum and energy transfers. The Sampling the Velocity of the Target nucleus (SVT) algorithm capable of determining the scattered neutron distributions is implemented in CINEL. The obtained distributions for free target nuclei such as hydrogen and oxygen are in good agreement with analytical results and Monte-Carlo simulations when incident neutron energies are above a few eV. The introduction of the effective temperature and the rejection step to the SVT algorithm shows improvements to the neutron up-scattering treatment of hydrogen bound in liquid water.