Dosimetry for Radiation Damage Studies

A method is presented for reporting fastneutron exposure in a meaningful and unambiguous fashion. Four steps are required: determination of the shape of the neutron spectrum, fixing its absolute magnitude, choosing a reasonable energy weighting for the neutrons, and reporting the exposure in useful units. Alternative procedures are described for performing each of these steps. The exposure unit proposed is based on the amount of energy effective for causing displacements that each neutron can transfer to the lattice. Use of this approach gives an accurate comparison of damaging exposure between widely differing neutron spectra.