Component Manual for the Neutron Ray-Tracing Package McStas, version 3.8.6

3.5  The Moderator McStas Component

A simple pulsed source for time-of-flight.

Identification

Description

Produces a simple time-of-flight spectrum, with a flat energy distribution

Example: Moderator(radius = 0.0707, dist = 9.035, focus_xw = 0.021, focus_yh = 0.021, Emin = 10, Emax = 15, Ec = 9.0, t0 = 37.15, gamma = 39.1)

Input parameters

Parameters in boldface are required; the others are optional.

Name

Unit

Description

Default

radius

m

Radius of source

0.07

Emin

meV

Lower edge of energy distribution

Emax

meV

Upper edge of energy distribution

dist

m

Distance from source to the focusing rectangle

0

focus_xw

m

Width of focusing rectangle

0.02

focus_yh

m

Height of focusing rectangle

0.02

t0

mus

decay constant for low-energy neutrons

37.15

Ec

meV

Critical energy, below which the flux decay is constant

9.0

gamma

meV

energy dependence of decay time

39.1

target_index

1

relative index of component to focus at, e.g. next is +1 this is used to compute ’dist’ automatically.

1

flux

1/(s cm 2 st meV)

flux

1

Links

A time-of-flight source (pulsed)



Name:

Moderator



Author:

(System) Mark Hagen, SNS



Input parameters

\(r_s\), \(E_0\), \(E_1\), \(z_f\), \(w\), \(h\), \(\tau _0\), \(E_c\), \(\gamma \)



Optional parameters



Notes




The simple time-of-flight source component Moderator resembles the source component Source_simple described in 3.1. Moderator is circular with radius \(r_s\) and focuses on a rectangular target of area \(w \times h\) in a distance \(z_f\). The initial velocity is chosen with a linear distribution within an interval, defined by the minimum and maximum energies, \(E_0\) and \(E_1\), respectively.

The initial time of the neutron is determined on basis of a simple heuristical model for the time dependence of the neutron intensity from a time-of-flight source. For all neutron energies, the flux decay is assumed to be exponential, \begin {equation} \Psi (E,t) = \exp (-t/\tau (E)) , \end {equation} where the decay constant is given by \begin {equation} \tau (E) = \left \{ \begin {array}{cc} \tau _0 & ; E<E_c \\ \tau _0 / [ 1 + (E-E_c)^2/\gamma ^2 ] & ; E \geq E_c \end {array} \right . \end {equation}

The decay parameters are \(\tau _0\) (in \(\mu \)s), \(E_c\), and \(\gamma \) (both in meV).

Other pulsed source models are available from contributed components. See section 3.10.