Nuclear Physics Seminars

Geant4 is a software toolkit for simulating how particles interact with matter. It has a wide range of applications across diverse fields, with an emphasis on the simulation of physics experiments and events. It is an important tool in the preparation and analysis of many nuclear and particle physics experiments. The software is constantly evolving with the field, as a network of Geant4 working groups optimizes the structure of the code and the accuracy of the physics. In some aspects, the software is still a work in progress, leaving some gaps in its ability to simulate all experiments. One such piece of physics that is missing from the software is accounting for spin polarization in low energy neutron scattering. Spin-polarized neutrons scattered from nuclei will exhibit a left-right asymmetry in their scattering distribution. This behavior is not included in the Geant4 classes that handle low energy neutron scattering. Including the calculations for this left-right asymmetry is a key component of utilizing Geant4 for simulating polarized neutron experiments. In this talk, I will describe our work on implementing polarization effects for elastic neutron scattering in Geant4 and demonstrate some proof-of-concept results of the effect these modifications can have on simulations.