Fission Fragments Produced from Proton Irradiation of Thorium Between 40 and 200 MeV

The cross sections for the formation of five residual radionuclides (72Se, 97Zr, 112Pd, 125Sb, and 147Nb) from 40- to 200-MeV proton irradiation of thorium have been measured and are reported. The atomic masses of these fragments span the expected mass distribution of radionuclides formed by fission of the target nucleus. Especially in mass regions corresponding to transitions between different relaxation mechanisms employed by available models, these data are expected to be useful to the improvement of high-energy transport codes. The predictions of the event generators incorporated into the latest release of the Monte Carlo N-Particle code (MCNP6) are compared with data measured in this work in the hope that these results may be useful to the continued process of code verification and validation in MCNP6.