Improved Calculation of Thermal Fission Energy

TL;DR

This paper refines the calculation of thermal fission energy for reactor isotopes, reducing uncertainties and improving accuracy using updated data, fission fragment yields, and antineutrino spectrum models, which benefits reactor neutrino experiments.

Contribution

It provides new, more precise thermal fission energy values for common reactor isotopes, incorporating recent data and improved modeling techniques.

Findings

Uncertainty in thermal fission energy reduced by about 50%.

Change in antineutrino flux calculation is approximately 0.32%.

Enhanced accuracy benefits future reactor neutrino experiments.

Abstract

Thermal fission energy is one of the basic parameters needed in the calculation of antineutrino flux for reactor neutrino experiments. It is useful to improve the precision of the thermal fission energy calculation for current and future reactor neutrino experiments, which are aimed at more precise determination of neutrino oscillation parameters. In this article, we give new values for thermal fission energies of some common thermal reactor fuel isotopes, with improvements on three aspects. One is more recent input data acquired from updated nuclear databases. the second one is a consideration of the production yields of fission fragments from both thermal and fast incident neutrons for each of the four main fuel isotopes. The last one is more carefully calculation of the average energy taken away by antineutrinos in thermal fission with the comparison of antineutrino spectrum from different models. The change in calculated antineutrino flux due to the new values of thermal fission energy is about 0.32%, and the uncertainties of the new values are about 50% smaller.