P(ND)2-2 – Second International Workshop on Perspectives on Nuclear Data for the Next Decade

Organised by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy
Commission (CEA) in co-operation with the NEA

14-17 October 2014 | Bruyères-le-Châtel, France

Introduction

The workshop, Perspectives on Nuclear Data for the Next Decade (P(ND)^2) held in Bruyères-le-Châtel, France on 26-28 September 2005, was organized in order to bring together experts involved in nuclear data production from both the modelling and the experimental points of view. With the declining number of nuclear data evaluators in the world and the reduced number of experimental facilities combined with an increasing need for nuclear data in existing and emerging nuclear applications, there was a high risk that evaluators concentrated on producing data rather than developing new models and methods. This risk is still present, and the initial idea of identifying the basic physics issues that will be important in the future is still relevant.

Since 2005 however, significant progress has been made with both experimental and modelling methods. Massively parallel computers are now currently used and make it possible to perform studies which were only dreams a few years ago. New issues have also appeared which challenge the evaluation process. A workshop was therefore organized to shed the light on new evaluation techniques as well as new emerging demands.

The questions that were addressed during this workshop were the following:

  • Could pure microscopic models be used to produce evaluations with the required accuracy and if not, how could they be improved or adjusted?
  • What was the status of the most complex approaches such as CDCC, microscopic fission and pre-equilibrium with respect to nuclear evaluation requirements?
  • Was there any way to improve the predictive power of phenomenological approaches thanks to microscopic outputs?
  • How could the quality of covariance matrices be addressed and judged when they could be produced?
  • What were the needs in terms of a new experiment to further constrain evaluation and models?
  • What kinds of new data could be obtained with new or upcoming experimental facilities?
  • How could new computers be used to answer all of the challenges that still existed?
  • How could global collaboration be improved to enhance the quality of evaluated data?

The goals were to discuss all the aforementioned questions and to identify the direction to follow during the subsequent 10 to 15 years. The focus of this meeting was on work that was not presently used in the evaluation process, but that could be expected to be useful for evaluation in the next decade. While this workshop was probably more focused on the modelling aspects of nuclear data evaluation, state-of-the-art experimental works should have also been discussed. There should have been no arbitrary limits on the projectiles, the energies or the types of envisioned applications, as long as innovative approaches were discussed. At the end of this workshop, one should have been able to draw a roadmap of the physics that would have to be included in future evaluation processes.

The format of this workshop was a specialist meeting (only invited talks) with about 40 speakers, which spanned four days in a format similar to the very successful series of specialists meeting on the optical model potential (Paris 1985, Bruyères-le-Châtel 1996).

Last update: 3 December 2014