Stationarity and source convergence in monte carlo criticality calculation.

In Monte Carlo (MC) criticality calculations, source error propagation through the stationary cycles and source convergcnce in the settling (inactive) cycles are both dominated by the dominance ratio (DR) of fission kernels, Le., the ratio of the second largest to largest eigenvalues. For symmetric two fissile component systems with DR close to unity, the extinction of fission source sites can occur in one of the components even when the initial source is symmetric and the number of histories per cycle is larger than one thousand. When such a system is made slightly asymmetric, the neutron effective multiplication factor (kern) at the inactive cycles does not reflect the convergence to stationary source distribution. To overcome this problem, relative entropy (Kullback Leibler distance) is applied to a slightly asymmetric two fissile component problem with a dominance ratio of 0.9925. Numerical results show that relative entropy is effective as a posterior diagnostic tool