Overview

Photo-induced reaction cross section data are of importance for a variety of current or emerging applications, such as radiation shielding design and radiation transport analyses, calculations of absorbed dose in the human body during radiotherapy, physics and technology of fission reactors (influence of photo-reactions on neutron balance) and fusion reactors (plasma diagnostics and shielding), activation analyses, safeguards and inspection technologies, nuclear waste transmutation, medical isotope production and astrophysical applications.
A new Evaluated Photonuclear Library PD-2019 was produced by the IAEA Coordinated Research Project (CRP). Extensive experimental measurements were also undertaken under the project which was of great help for new evaluations. In particular, collaboration measurements undertaken at the LCS NewSUBARU facility (Laboratory of Advanced Science and Technology for Industry, University of Hyogo, Japan) were critical for the success of the project. Both experimental and evaluation efforts carried out within the CRP to update the IAEA Photonuclear Data Library are explained in Kawano et al., Nuclear Data Sheets 163 (2020) 109-162. The new library includes 199 mostly new evaluations, 20 evaluations were retained from the previous 1999 IAEA Photonuclear Data Library (IAEA/PD-1999).

ENDF-6 formatted library

The library contains evaluated photonuclear data for 219 isotopes for incident photons (gamma rays) with energies mostly up to 200 MeV. The list of the files is available here. The library includes cross sections and emission spectra in ENDF-6 format. The file format description is explained in the report IAEA-NDS-0232. The ENDF-6 formatted individual evaluations are available at IAEA GitHub site. The complete ENDF-6 library can be downloaded as a compressed (tar.gz) archive under the following link:

IAEA Photonuclear Data Library 2019 (ENDF-6) (iaea-pd2019.tar.gz)

Tabular form

The evaluated photonuclear library is also available in tabular form (x,y(±Δy)). Tables were produced for those channels that can be extracted from the ENDF-6 formatted library. Download the library here.

To untar the files, use the command tar -zxvf filename.tar.gz on Unix or MacOS.

Application files (ACE)

The ace files in the subdirectories have been produced by ACEMAKER. For details regarding the processing, consult this report.

For each material, several ace files are available and differ in regard to the inclusion of delayed neutron data for photo-fission and the inclusion of production cross-sections. Files that contain production cross-sections are provided in two forms (Prod, MT>1000 and Prod, MT<1000). They include the same data but use different MT number assignments for production data due to the fact that MCNP 6.2 cannot handle production MT numbers greater than 999. See the next section for details.

The table below summarizes the available files and indicates what data are included in the ace files.

Coding of production cross sections

Production cross-sections can be used as tallies in Monte Carlo transport codes. For photonuclear ACE files, production data is included in the same file as the cross-sections for transport calculations. In the archives ZP1N_.tar.gz and ZP1N1.tar.gz, long MT numbers for production are used, which are not yet supported by MCNP 6.2. The associations are described in the corresponding txt files. For instance, the following lines from the file g_26-Fe-56-2631.txt for Fe-53,

   i     MT/MTD     Q [MeV]     T [MeV] LMF  MT    ZAP LFS
 ...
 211   50026053    0.000000   36.000000   6   5  26053   0
 212   51026053    0.000000   38.000000   6   5  26053   1
 ...

indicate that the MT number 50026053 is associated with the production of the isotope Fe-53 (given in the column ZAP) in the ground state (LFS=0). Analogously, MT number 51026053 gives the same product in a meta-stable level indicated by LFS=1.

In the ace files of the archives ZP2N_.tar.gz and ZP2N1.tar.gz, short MT numbers for production are used, which are supported by MCNP 6.2. The assocations are described in the corresponding txt files. Taking the same example as above,

   i     MT/MTD     Q [MeV]     T [MeV] LMF  MT    ZAP LFS
 ...
 211        428    0.000000   36.000000   6   5  26053   0
 212        429    0.000000   38.000000   6   5  26053   1
 ...

now the MT number associated with the production of Fe-53 in ground state is 428 and for the production of the meta stable level is 429.

Derived activation libraries

An activation library prepared at the IAEA Nuclear Data Section by H. Kawada (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan), J.-Ch. Sublet and S. Okumura (IAEA), and T. Kawano (LANL, USA), is described in the report on "Processing of the Evaluated Photonuclear Data Library (IAEA-PD2019)" available as IAEA-NDS-0232. The processed activation files can be also retrieved from the IAEA Github as individual files (*.endf, *.pdf, etc) and tar compressed file (*.tar.gz) as follows.

File type	Filename (.tar.gz)
EVAPLOT check/plot (Activation)	graphs.tar.gz
FISPACT-II 162 gprs files	gxs-162.tar.gz
Linearised ENDF file (PENDF)	hendf.tar.gz