Numerical aspects in the study of neutron propagation

The study of the propagation of localized source pulses is an important problem in nuclear reactor physics and in the analysis of pulsed experiments. In a previous work the characterization of the transport operator has been performed and the physical distortions introduced by approximate models, such as spherical harmonics, have been evidenced by means of an analytical asymptotic approach. In this paper, the SN and PN−1 time-dependent models are numerically discretized in space and solved analytically in time, in order to evidence the error associated with discretization schemes.