Advanced active interrogation sources for remote detection of special nuclear material
AWE has recently commenced a research programme to develop techniques for the remote detection of illicitly trafficked, special nuclear material. Three techniques that are being investigated as part of this programme utilise an active interrogation source to stimulate a radiation signature within SNM. A photonuclear technique and nuclear resonance fluorescence require an active gamma source while a technique stimulating fission with low energy neutrons requires a low energy neutron source. The potential for consolidation of the photonuclear and neutron technique is discussed. Conceptual designs of intense, pulsed, ion beam diodes to generate suitable sources of 6-7MeV gamma photons for the photonuclear technique and ≪100keV neutron sources for the active neutron technique are presented. The sources required for remote detection via the 60keV neutron or photofission techniques are contrasted with the source requirements for nuclear resonance fluorescence.
Active detection of small quantities of shielded highly-enriched uranium using low-dose 60-kev neutron interrogation
Abstract Active interrogation with low-energy neutrons provides a search technique for highly-enriched uranium concealed in cargo. We describe the technique and show initial results using a low-dose 60-keV neutron beam. This technique produces a clear induced fission signal in the presence of small quantities of 235 U. The technique has been validated with low-Z and high-Z cargo materials. The technique uses a forward-directed beam of 60-keV neutrons to induce fission in 235 U. Detection of the fast fission neutrons with pulse-shape discriminating scintillators is then the signature for 235 U. The beam of neutrons is generated with a 1.93 MeV proton beam impinging on a natural lithium target. The proton beam is produced by a radio-frequency quadrupole LINAC. The 60 keV neutron beam is forward-directed because the 7 Li(p, n) reaction is just above threshold for a proton energy of 1.93 MeV.
Monte carlo simulation of events with Drell-Yan lepton pairs from antiproton-proton collisions
The complete knowledge of the nucleon spin structure at leading twist requires also addressing the transverse spin distribution of quarks, or transversity, which is yet unexplored because of its chiral-odd nature. Transversity can be best extracted from single-spin asymmetries in fully polarized Drell-Yan processes with antiprotons, where valence contributions are involved anyway. Alternatively, in single-polarized Drell-Yan the transversity happens convoluted with another chiral-odd function, which is likely to be responsible for the well known (and yet unexplained) violation of the Lam-Tung sum rule in the corresponding unpolarized cross section. We present Monte Carlo simulations for the unpolarized and single-polarized Drell-Yan pp{sup ({up_arrow}}{sup )}{yields}{mu}{sup +}{mu}{sup -}X at different center-of-mass energies in both configurations where the antiproton beam hits a fixed proton target or it collides on another proton beam. The goal is to estimate the minimum number of events needed to extract the above chiral-odd distributions from future measurements at the high energy storage ring (HESR) at GSI. It is important to study the feasibility of such experiments at HESR in order to demonstrate that interesting spin physics can be explored already using unpolarized antiprotons.