Validation and Verification of MCNP6 Against Intermediate and High-Energy Experimental Data and Results by Other Codes

TL;DR

This paper validates and verifies MCNP6, a comprehensive nuclear transport code, against experimental data and other codes, demonstrating its accuracy and identifying areas for further improvement.

Contribution

It provides a thorough validation and verification of MCNP6 using advanced event generators and compares its performance with other established codes.

Findings

MCNP6 describes reactions at energies from 18 MeV to 1 TeV accurately.

MCNP6 results agree well with other codes like MCNPX, CEM03.02, and LAQGSM03.03.

Several bugs and physics issues in MCNP6/X have been identified and fixed.

Abstract

MCNP6, the latest and most advanced LANL transport code representing a recent merger of MCNP5 and MCNPX, has been Validated and Verified (V&V) against a variety of intermediate and high-energy experimental data and against results by different versions of MCNPX and other codes. In the present work, we V&V MCNP6 using mainly the latest modifications of the Cascade-Exciton Model (CEM) and of the Los Alamos version of the Quark-Gluon String Model (LAQGSM) event generators CEM03.02 and LAQGSM03.03. We found that MCNP6 describes reasonably well various reactions induced by particles and nuclei at incident energies from 18 MeV to about 1 TeV per nucleon measured on thin and thick targets and agrees very well with similar results obtained with MCNPX and calculations by CEM03.02, LAQGSM03.01 (03.03), INCL4 + ABLA, and Bertini INC + Dresner evaporation, EPAX, ABRABLA, HIPSE, and AMD, used as stand alone codes. Most of several computational bugs and more serious physics problems observed in MCNP6/X during our V&V have been fixed; we continue our work to solve all the known problems before MCNP6 is distributed to the public.