Kernel reconstruction methods for Doppler broadening — Temperature interpolation by linear combination of reference cross sections at optimally chosen temperatures
This paper establishes a new family of methods to perform temperature interpolation of nuclear interactions cross sections, reaction rates, or cross sections times the energy. One of these quantities at temperature T is approximated as a linear combination of quantities at reference temperatures (T j ). The problem is formalized in a cross section independent fashion by considering the kernels of the different operators that convert cross section related quantities from a temperature T 0 to a higher temperature T — namely the Doppler broadening operation. Doppler broadening interpolation of nuclear cross sections is thus here performed by reconstructing the kernel of the operation at a given temperature T by means of linear combination of kernels at reference temperatures (T j ). The choice of the L 2 metric yields optimal linear interpolation coefficients in the form of the solutions of a linear algebraic system inversion. The optimization of the choice of reference temperatures (T j ) is then undertaken so as to best reconstruct, in the L∞ sense, the kernels over a given temperature range [T min ,T max ]. The performance of these kernel reconstruction methods is then assessed in light of previous temperature interpolation methods by testing them upon isotope 238 U. Temperature-optimized free Doppler kernel reconstruction significantly outperforms all previous interpolation-based methods, achieving 0.1% relative error on temperature interpolation of 238 U total cross section over the temperature range [300 K,3000 K] with only 9 reference temperatures.