Machine Learning Based Efficiency Calculator (MaLBEC) for Nuclear Fusion Diagnostics

Abstract Diagnostics are critical for commercial and research fusion machines, since measuring and understanding plasma features is important to sustaining fusion reactions. The neutron flux (and therefore fusion power) can be indirectly calculated using neutron activation analyses, where potentially large numbers of activation foils are placed in the neutron flux, and delayed gammas from key reactions are measured via gamma spectrometry. In gamma spectrometry, absolute efficiency forms part of the activity calculation, and equals to the ratio of the total number of photons detected to the number emitted by a radioactive sample. Hence, it is imperative that they are calculated efficiently and accurately. This paper presents a novel digital efficiency calculation algorithm, the Machine Learning Based Efficiency Calculator (MaLBEC), that uses state-of-the-art supervised machine learning techniques to calculate efficiency values of a given sample, from only four inputs. In this paper, the performance of the MaLBEC is demonstrated with a fusion sample and compares the values to a traditional efficiency calculation method, Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP). The efficiencies from the MaLBEC were within an average 5% of the ones produced by MCNP, but with an exceptional reduction in computation time of 99.96%. When the efficiency values from both methods were used in the activity calculation, the MaLBEC was within 3% of the MCNP results.