On the equivalence of the RTI and SVM approaches to time correlated analysis
- Safe Guard & Security Technology (SST), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
Recently two papers on how to perform passive neutron auto-correlation analysis on time gated histograms formed from pulse train data, generically called time correlation analysis (TCA), have appeared in this journal [1,2]. For those of us working in international nuclear safeguards these treatments are of particular interest because passive neutron multiplicity counting is a widely deployed technique for the quantification of plutonium. The purpose of this letter is to show that the skewness-variance-mean (SVM) approach developed in [1] is equivalent in terms of assay capability to the random trigger interval (RTI) analysis laid out in [2]. Mathematically we could also use other numerical ways to extract the time correlated information from the histogram data including for example what we might call the mean, mean square, and mean cube approach. The important feature however, from the perspective of real world applications, is that the correlated information extracted is the same, and subsequently gets interpreted in the same way based on the same underlying physics model.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- NA-22; AC52-06NA25396
- OSTI ID:
- 1239269
- Alternate ID(s):
- OSTI ID: 1247606
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-14-28053; PII: S0168900214013527
- Journal Information:
- Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research. Section A, Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment, Vol. 773, Issue C; ISSN 0168-9002
- Publisher:
- ElsevierCopyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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