Regular Article

The MCNP^®6 code: A decade of progress

Los Alamos National Laboratory, P.O. Box 1663, Los Alamos, NM, 87545, USA

^* e-mail: mrising@lanl.gov

Received: 23 October 2024
Received in final form: 23 December 2024
Accepted: 30 January 2025
Published online: 28 March 2025

Abstract

After several years of effort involved in merging the Los Alamos National Laboratory MCNP5 and MCNPX codes, in 2013 the first production release of version 6 of the Monte Carlo N-Particle^®, or MCNP^®, code MCNP6.1 was distributed publicly. Since then, three significant releases have been issued: MCNP6.1.1beta in 2014, MCNP6.2 in 2018, and MCNP6.3 in 2023. While each release always contains new features, code enhancements, and bug fixes, each version has had a different primary focus, ranging from improved calculational efficiency to new powerful utilities and tools, to software modernization of the code base. With all that has been learned over the first decade of the MCNP6 code, continuous progress is being made toward a modernized, general-purpose Monte Carlo radiation transport code that remains a trusted resource for the global community of practitioners. This paper describes these first 10+ years of the MCNP6 code and its continually improving data libraries, and gives some insight into how the next decade is expected to unfold.