The MCUCN simulation code for ultracold neutron physics

Abstract

Ultracold neutrons (UCN) have very low kinetic energies 0-300 neV, thereby can be stored in specific material or magnetic confinements for many hundreds of seconds. This makes them a very useful tool in probing fundamental symmetries of nature (for instance charge-parity violation by neutron electric dipole moment experiments) and contributing important parameters for the Big Bang nucleosynthesis (neutron lifetime measurements). Improved precision experiments are in construction at new and planned UCN sources around the world. MC simulations play an important role in the optimization of such systems with a large number of parameters, but also in the estimation of systematic effects, in benchmarking of analysis codes, or as part of the analysis. The MCUCN code written at PSI has been extensively used for the optimization of the UCN source optics and in the optimization and analysis of (test) experiments within the nEDM project based at PSI. In this paper we present the main features of MCUCN and interesting benchmark and application examples.

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• Neutron lifetime measurements using gravitationally trapped ultracold neutrons
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Cited by in corpus (12)

• A search for neutron to mirror-neutron oscillations
• Solid deuterium surface degradation at ultracold neutron sources
• Neutron optics of the PSI ultracold neutron source: characterization and simulation
• Ultracold neutron storage and transport at the PSI UCN source
• Statistical sensitivity of the nEDM apparatus at PSI to neutron mirror-neutron oscillations
• Time-of-flight spectroscopy of ultracold neutrons at the PSI UCN source
• Johnson-Nyquist Noise Effects in Neutron Electric-Dipole-Moment Experiments
• Characterization of ultracold neutron production in thin solid deuterium films at the PSI Ultracold Neutron source
• Monte Carlo simulations for the optimization and data analysis of experiments with ultracold neutrons
• A novel technique of extracting UCN lifetimes from storage bottle measurements dominated by scattering losses
• Ultra-cold neutron simulation framework for the free neutron lifetime experiment $\tau$SPECT
• Ultracold Neutron Storage Simulation Using the Kassiopeia Software Package