Multi-species Neutron Transport Equation

The neutron transport equation (NTE) describes the flux of neutrons through inhomogeneous fissile medium. Whilst well treated in the nuclear physics literature, the NTE has had a somewhat scattered treatment in mathematical literature with a variety of different approaches. Within a probabilistic framework it has somewhat undeservingly received little attention in recent years; nonetheless, a few probabilistic treatments can be found. In this article our aim is threefold. First we want to introduce a slightly more general setting for the NTE, which gives a more complete picture of the different species of particle and radioactive fluxes that are involved in fission. Second we consolidate the classical \(c_0\)-semigroup approach to solving the NTE with the method of stochastic representation which involves expectation semigroups. Third we provide the leading asymptotic of our multi-species NTE, which will turn out to be crucial for further stochastic analysis of the NTE in forthcoming work (Cox et al. 2019; Harris et al. 2018; Horton et al. 2018). The methodology used in this paper harmonises the culture of expectation semigroup analysis from the theory of stochastic processes against \(c_0\)-semigroup theory from functional analysis. In this respect, our presentation is thus part review of existing theory and part presentation of new research results based on generalisation of existing results.