Research Essay for the Goldwater Scholarship Application

Oxygen is found in many natural and human-made structures and materials, including water, concrete, or any oxide. The severe lack of data on the cross section of ¹⁶O(n,α), a reaction that can be found in any material containing oxygen, is detrimental to a complete understanding of the natural or induced behavior of these materials [HYL16]. Additionally, study of this particular reaction and other neutron-induced reactions involving oxygen are useful in the design of naval light water reactors and applications in radio-biology [HYL16]. A detailed understanding of the ¹⁶O(n,α) reaction is vital to the safe and efficient study, design, and development of applications such as these. My consequent work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), under the supervision of my mentor, Dr. Hye Young Lee, concerned an experiment to measure the reaction rate of ¹⁶O(n,α) with unprecedented precision, using a method of experimentation known as the ''forward propagating approach''. What separates this method from traditional experimentation is in the use of computer simulations; in essence, this method entails the development of a computer-simulated experimental environment that behaves similarly to a corresponding physical experimental environment (the word ''similar'' is used here to convey an equivalence in properties of materials, like geometry or density, and characteristics of certain nuclear processes between the simulated and physical environments). The simulated environment receives inputs, like detector resolution and efficiency, beam resolution, or theoretical calculations of cross sections, that are determined from physically measured results, and then output data that - provided the simulation was prepared and executed properly - closely resemble the results expected from physical execution of the experiment. By comparing data from the simulated experiment and the physical experiment, the relevant results can be constrained to achieve a high precision measurement. The goal of my mentor's experiment - the experiment that I helped build and simulate - was to achieve a high precision measurement of the cross section of ¹⁶O(n,α) using the forward propagating approach technique.