Predicting Nuclear Reactions with Confidence

The BNN-I6 model accurately predicts (n,p) reaction cross sections across a wide range of nuclei, with root-mean-square deviations [latex]\sigma_{rms}[/latex] generally remaining small-indicating successful capture of the systematic dependence on neutron and proton number-though slightly larger deviations emerge for mid-mass and heavy nuclei, potentially due to increased structural complexity and limited experimental data in those regions.

A new machine learning approach leverages Bayesian Neural Networks to accurately forecast neutron-induced reaction probabilities and, crucially, quantify the uncertainty in those predictions.