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How the hell would you generate neutrons from X-rays? The energy is nowhere close to neutron-antineutron pair production. Higher energy gamma rays can do that,
by corty 6y ago
How the hell would you generate neutrons from X-rays? The energy is nowhere close to neutron-antineutron pair production. Higher energy gamma rays can do that, but you need a really big accellerator to produce them. Splitting nuclei by gamma rays is a little easier, but not much. Still far away from the usual bremsstrahlung energy range, except if you have one of the few accellerators that can produce those high-energy electrons for you. Oh, and if you are really going for bremsstrahlung, prepare for lots and lots of noise from secondary reactions and lower-energy bremsstrahlung to filter out. If you want synchrotronstrahlung, good luck building a 1000km one.
- scythe 6y agoWell, I had internalized that you get neutron contamination when you treat with accelerating voltages of 10 MV or higher, and I didn't bother to look it up. It's generated in the X-ray target by the reaction of the 10 MeV electron with a tungsten nucleus: https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/33/050/33050453.pdf https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/... So it's more accurate to say that megavoltage X-ray beams contain neutrons by default. I might need to know this on the ABR... :p