Changed code to only include the one significant resonance at 2 keV.
I also changed it such that the neutron is not always absorbed if it is within a resonance but I choose if it scatters or is absorbed by the cross sections. This was tricky but I made a function that gets the job done correctly and with high precision. Essentially I create a list of just 1’s and 2’s and the number of 1’s or 2’s depends on the weighting of which reaction is more likely to occur. This works, but doing this for ever trial takes a lot of time (~3 minutes for one trial). I can speed it up by lowering the number of decimal points I have for my percentages that tell the weighing of each reaction.
I fit the resonance to a function and calculated the area under the curve, then I compared this to the area under my box approximate. I found that my box’s area was only 60% of the fit’s. So I have decided to just use the fitted curve as it is not very hard to put into code.
Using the one resonance, the cross sectional fit (not the box approximation), and with the choosing if the neutron is absorbed or not, I ran a counting experiment. I did this I found that only 1.6% of neutrons are captured by this resonance. So this resonance is not enormously significant but it was valuable to see this.
I am working on doing the next project which is to have multiple substances.
I have fit the XC data for the C-12, H-3, H.
The format of the program was was to calculate the cross section at each energy first and then separately calculate the mean free path. This works fine for one material, but if I have multiple materials this does not work because the mean free path depends on the cross section but also the number density of the substance the neutron is colliding with. So I need to somehow relate each cross section data point with what substance that cross section was calculated for. I found a fix where I can create a corresponding list that will tell me what substance the cross section was calculated for, so when I calculate the mean free path I know which number density to use. I am in the process of doing this now.