An information theory approach to minimise correlated systematic uncertainty in modelling resonance parameters

Covariance matrix elements depict the statistical and systematic uncertainties in reactor parameter measurements. All the efforts have so far been devoted only to minimise the statistical uncertainty by repeated measurements but the dominant systematic uncertainty has either been neglected or randomized. In recent years efforts has been devoted to simulate the resonance parameter uncertainty information through covariance matrices in code SAMMY. But, the code does not have any provision to check the reliability of the simulated covariance data. We propose a new approach called entropy based information theory to reduce the systematic uncertainty in the correlation matrix element so that resonance parameters with minimum systematic uncertainty can be modelled. We apply our information theory approach in generating the resonance parameters of 156Gd with reduced systematic uncertainty and demonstrate the superiority of our technique over the principal component analysis method.