Stochastic aspects of neutron slowing down processes

Abstract

This paper presents a review of all the aspects of slowing down phenomena in which stochastic considerations of the process need to be taken into account. The cases both with and without absorption are treated. A consistent treatment is given of the energy distribution functions, the moments of collisions to slow down past a certain energy, the speed of neutrons and the slowing down time, with explicit expressions for the expectation and variance in all cases. Besides a compact and uniform derivation of known results, some new results are also presented.