Neutron spectrometry with artificial neural networks

An artificial neural network has been designed to obtain the neutron spectra from the Bonner spheres spectrometer's count rates. The neural network was trained using 129 neutron spectra. These include isotopic neutron sources; reference and operational spectra from accelerators and nuclear reactors, spectra from mathematical functions as well as few energy groups and monoenergetic spectra. The spectra were transformed from lethargy to energy distribution and were re-bin ned to 31 energy groups using the MCNP 4C code. Re-binned spectra and UTA4 response matrix were used to calculate the expected count rates in Bonner spheres spectrometer. These count rates were used as input and the respective spectrum was used as output during neural network training. After training the network was tested with the Bonner spheres count rates produced by a set of neutron spectra. This set contains data used during network training as well as data not used. Training and testing was carried out in the Mat lab program. To verify the network unfolding performance the original and unfolded spectra were compared using the χ2-test and the total fluence ratios. The use of Artificial Neural Networks to unfold neutron spectra in neutron spectrometry is an alternative procedure that overcomes the drawbacks associated in this ill-conditioned problem. (Author)