Design optimization of MYRRHA proton beam profile expermiments

The MYRRHA project is an accelerator driven system (ADS) that will be built in SCK CEN, Belgium. It consists on a subcritical reactor coupled to a proton accelerator. The injector of the accelerator is currently under construction at the CRC/UCL (Cyclotron Resource Centre of the Universit´e Catholique de Louvain) for the commissioning and accelerator tests. At the moment, the current set up accelerates protons up to 1.5 MeV with a radio frequency quadrupole (RFQ). For the commissioning of the accelerator, it is important to demonstrate the reliability of the machine by means of measurements. This is important to ensure that the proton beam generated is as it should be and it does not produce losses. Several experiments have been already performed in UCL and data is available. For the future, the following components will be added to the accelerator and higher energies will be reached. Particularly, the two parameters that want to be measured are the proton beam energy and energy spread at the exit of the components. To measure them, the experimental setup is based on the Rutherford Backscattering Spectometry (RBS). It consists on a first copper collimator that collimates the beam and then a gold foil in an aluminium holder in which the proton beam targets. At energies of MeV, when ions interacts with matter different processes occurs, among which the elastic scattering. By analysing the elastic backscattered protons in a detector, the original mean energy and energy spread can be deduced. Parallel to the measurements, simulations can be performed. This simulations should be performed before the experiments in order to optimise the design and maximise the efficiency and quality of the experiments. The aim of this thesis is precisely perform simulations to help finding the optimal design of the MYRRHA accelerator proton beam experiment. Furthermore, simulations can be also validated with the available experimental data. The simulations are performed using two codes: SIMNRA, which allows a fast optimisation, and MCNP6.2, which is commonly used for radiation transport simulations.