2023/12/13 by Georg Schnabel, Schnabel, Georg, Daniel López Aldama +3
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #D.3.1 #E.2 #FOS: Physical sciences #Graphite, nuclear technology, radiation studies #H.3.7 #Nuclear Physics and Applications #Nuclear Theory (nucl-th) #Nuclear and radioactivity studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2312.08249
openalex publication_date 2023/12/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The ENDF-6 format, widely used worldwide for storing and disseminating nuclear data, is managed by the Cross Sections Evaluation Working Group (CSEWG) and fully documented in the ENDF-6 formats manual. This manual employs a combination of formal and natural language, introducing the possibility of ambiguity in certain parts of the format specification. To eliminate the possibility of ambiguity, this contribution proposes a generalization of the formal language used in the ENDF-6 formats manual, which is precisely defined in extended Backus-Naur form (EBNF). This formalization also offers several other advantages, notably reducing the complexity of creating and updating parsing and validation programs for ENDF-6 formatted files. Moreover, the availability of a formal description enables the automatic mapping of the low-level ENDF-6 representation, provided by a sequence of numbers, to a more human-friendly hierarchical representation with variable names. Demonstrating these advantages, almost the entire ENDF-6 format description has been translated into the proposed formal language, accompanied by a reference implementation of a parser/translator. This implementation leverages the formal format specification to enable reading, writing, and validating ENDF-6 formatted files.