The critical catastrophe revisited

DOI10.1088/1742-5468/2015/08/P08021MaRDI QIDQ3302385zbMATHFDO

Authors Clélia de Mulatier, E. Dumonteil, Alberto Rosso, Andrea Zoia

Publication date 11 August 2020

Published in Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05232

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Nuclear reactor theory; neutron transport (82D75)

Abstract: The neutron population in a prototype model of nuclear reactor can be described in terms of a collection of particles confined in a box and undergoing three key random mechanisms: diffusion, reproduction due to fissions, and death due to absorption events. When the reactor is operated at the critical point, and fissions are exactly compensated by absorptions, the whole neutron population might in principle go to extinction because of the wild fluctuations induced by births and deaths. This phenomenon, which has been named critical catastrophe, is nonetheless never observed in practice: feedback mechanisms acting on the total population, such as human intervention, have a stabilizing effect. In this work, we revisit the critical catastrophe by investigating the spatial behaviour of the fluctuations in a confined geometry. When the system is free to evolve, the neutrons may display a wild patchiness (clustering). On the contrary, imposing a population control on the total population acts also against the local fluctuations, and may thus inhibit the spatial clustering. The effectiveness of population control in quenching spatial fluctuations will be shown to depend on the competition between the mixing time of the neutrons (i.e., the average time taken for a particle to explore the finite viable space) and the extinction time.

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Cited in

(5)

• Scaling limit of the Fleming-Viot multicolor process
• Joint distribution of two local times for diffusion processes with the application to the construction of various conditioned processes
• Clusters in the critical branching Brownian motion
• Constrained Brownian processes and constrained Brownian bridges
• Constraint Ornstein-Uhlenbeck bridges

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