Intranuclear cascade with emission of light fragment code implemented in the transport code system PHITS

The Intranuclear Cascade with Emission of Light Fragment (INC–ELF) code has been developed and implemented in the Particle and Heavy Ion Transport code System (PHITS). The INC–ELF code explicitly includes nucleon correlations within the framework of the INC model to describe light fragment emissions from nuclear spallation reactions by using the model in Phys. Rev. C 84, (2011) 064617. In addition to the degrees of freedom of nucleons, the developed code also accounts for pions, Δs, and N∗s, and can cover energy ranges up to 3 GeV. The predictive capabilities of the ELF/PHITS system have been verified through comparison with a diverse set of experimental observations. In particular, the verification was conducted with abundant double-differential cross-section data covering a wide range of reactions (e.g., (p, p’x), (p, nx), (p, dx), (p, 3Hex), (p, αx) and (p, πx) reactions) over a wide energy range (between 400 MeV and 1.5 GeV). As a result, our ELF/PHITS code has demonstrated strong predictive capability for all of these data, although areas requiring future study remain due to the lack of experimental data on high-energy cluster production.