From 2012 to 2015, I worked as a PhD student at Université Paris Sud at the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Modèles Statistiques and at the CEA Saclay, under the supervision of Alberto Rosso (Paris Sud), Cheikh Diop and Andrea Zoia (CEA).
During these three years, I have been mainly interested in branching random walks and anomalous diffusion in the context of stochastic neutron transport in nuclear reactor physics.
My PhD thesis « A random walk approach to stochastic neutron transport » is available here. The manuscript tackles several problems of neutron transport that cannot be solved with the usual approaches of neutronics (which assume neutron’s displacements to be Brownian and use mean field theory). The results are not restricted to applications in neutron transport. In particular, I developed tools to quantify the fluctuation statistics of a population of branching random walkers evolving in a confined environment, and studied properties of anomalous transport in confined environments.
Keywords: neutron transport, branching random walks, fluctuation statistics, anomalous diffusion, confined geometries, Monte Carlo simulations.