6. Conclusion

The field of basic physics, intended for particle transport codes developed in disciplines such as neutronics and radiation protection, is both vast and complex, involving a wide variety of physics in which three of the four fundamental interactions identified to date are involved: the electromagnetic interaction, the weak nuclear interaction and the strong nuclear interaction.

The use of basic physical data cannot be reduced to the simple exploitation of measurement results stored in a computer file, but requires the processing of these data using physico-mathematical formalisms and associated software to produce coherent data sets known as evaluations. These evaluations are in turn processed physically, numerically and computationally to form data libraries that can be used by particle transport and time evolution codes for nuclides formed by irradiation. It is...