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Christmas Light
’Twas the night before Christmas when all through the house
No electrons were flowing through even my mouse.
All devices were plugged by the chimney with care
With the hope that St. Nikola Tesla would share.
C. S. Barnett
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 50 | Number 4 | April 1973 | Pages 398-401
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE73-A26578
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Consider one-speed model neutron migration in an infinite homogeneous medium. Let a neutron be released from the origin at time zero. A probabilistic argument is used to show that without approximation the neutron’s mean square distance from the origin at time t, given that absorption has not occurred, is , where v is the neutron speed, λs is the scattering mean-free-path, and is the mean cosine of the scattering angle. The expression outside the brace is the diffusion theory result. For large t, the exact result tends to the diffusion theory result, while for small t, the exact result tends to (vt)2, an extreme nondiffusion result.