Using Geant4 to simulate the interaction of thermal neutrons with boron-10 semiconductors

Our project studies thermal neutrons' interaction with boron-10 in semiconductors. The research uses boron-10 because by capturing an extra neutron, boron-10 would become boron-11 before splitting up and going through a nuclear reaction. When boron-10 and neutron interact, we get a reaction called the alpha lithium reaction, which means that when a boron-10 and neutron interact about 94% of the time, it produces an alpha particle, a lithium-7 particle, and gamma radiation. The gamma radiation doesn't get produced the other 6% of the time. Cadmium is a shielding material used in the neutron beam since it absorbs low-energy neutrons. We use Geant4, a publicly available particle simulation platform, to model particles passing through different types of matter. We successfully simulated neutrons of energy ranges from one meV to 4 MeV, hitting our target of boron-10, high-density polyethylene, and cadmium using Geant4 on the Texas Advanced Computing Cluster. We present various results and plots of the efficiency of relevant reactions to compare to the data collected from actual exposures of our semiconductors.