Effect of hydrogen on albedo neutrons in lunar surface: A computational investigation by means of GEANT4 simulations

TL;DR

This study uses GEANT4 simulations to analyze how hydrogen presence affects the energy spectrum of albedo neutrons emitted from the lunar surface, revealing hydrogen's detectable influence across neutron energy regimes.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed computational model to assess hydrogen's impact on lunar neutron albedo spectra, incorporating realistic lunar soil composition and proton spectra.

Findings

Hydrogen presence alters the neutron energy spectrum at the lunar surface.

Hydrogen's effect is observable across thermal, epithermal, and fast neutron regimes.

Simulation results can inform lunar soil composition analysis.

Abstract

Motivated by the interaction of the cosmic ray protons with the lunar surface in the absence and presence of hydrogen, a series of GEANT4 simulations are employed in the current study to unveil the influence of hydrogen on the energy spectrum of the albedo neutrons that escape from the lunar surface. Initially, a discrete 69-bin proton energy spectrum between 0.4 and 115 GeV based on the PAMELA spectrometer is implemented into GEANT4. Subsequently, a single-volume lunar surface of 2-m thickness is constructed where it is assumed that a single layer of either 1.6 or 1.93 g/cm$^{3}$ constitutes the lunar regolith. The material composition in the present study includes 43.7 wt.$\%$ oxygen, 0.3 wt.$\%$ sodium, 5.6 wt.$\%$ magnesium, 9 wt.$\%$ aluminum, 21.1 wt.$\%$ silicon, 8.5 wt.$\%$ calcium, 1.5 wt.$\%$ titanium, 0.1 wt.$\%$ manganese, and 10.2 wt.$\%$ iron in accordance with another study. Then, 0.1 wt.$\%$ hydrogen is introduced by replacing oxygen in order to assess the impact of hydrogen on the secondary neutrons. In the wake of irradiating a lunar surface of 3$\times$2$\times$3 m$^{3}$ with a planar vertical PAMELA proton beam of 20$\times$20 cm$^{2}$, the depth profile of the generated neutrons as well as the corresponding initial energy spectrum is primarily obtained in the absence and presence of 0.1 wt.$\%$ hydrogen by voxelizing the entire geometry with 100 cells of 2-cm thickness. Next, a surface detector is placed at the top of the lunar surface in order to collect the albedo neutrons in both cases, and the energy spectra of the albedo neutrons are acquired in terms of thermal, epithermal, and fast neutrons. From the GEANT4 simulations in this study, it is shown that the presence of 0.1 wt.$\%$ hydrogen is observable in each energy regime of the albedo neutrons at the lunar surface, thereby providing an indication about the elemental variation of the lunar soil.