ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Mathematics & Computation
Division members promote the advancement of mathematical and computational methods for solving problems arising in all disciplines encompassed by the Society. They place particular emphasis on numerical techniques for efficient computer applications to aid in the dissemination, integration, and proper use of computer codes, including preparation of computational benchmark and development of standards for computing practices, and to encourage the development on new computer codes and broaden their use.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Artenio De Matteis, Rolando Simonini
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 65 | Number 1 | January 1978 | Pages 93-105
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE78-A27129
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A class of stochastic models for the Monte Carlo integration of the adjoint neutron transport equation is described. Some current general methods are brought within this class, thus preparing the ground for subsequent comparisons. Monte Carlo integration of the adjoint Boltzmann equation can be seen as a simulation of the transport of mathematical particles with reaction kernels not normalized to unity. This last feature is a source of difficulty: It can influence the variance of the result negatively and also often leads to preparation of special “libraries” consisting of tables of normalization factors as functions of energy, presently used by several methods. These are the two main points that are discussed and that are taken into account to devise a nonmultigroup method of solution for a certain class of problems. Reactions considered in detail are radiative capture, elastic scattering, discrete levels and continuum inelastic scattering, for which the need for tables has been almost completely eliminated. The basic policy pursued to avoid a source of statistical fluctuations is to try to make the statistical weight of the traveling particle dependent only on its starting and current energies, at least in simple cases. The effectiveness of the sampling schemes proposed is supported by numerical comparison with other more general adjoint Monte Carlo methods. Computation of neutron flux at a point by means of an adjoint formulation is the problem taken as a test for numerical experiments. Very good results have been obtained in the difficult case of resonant cross sections.