The Pion Single-Event Effect Resonance and its Impact in an Accelerator Environment

The pion resonance in the nuclear reaction cross section is seen to have a direct impact on the single-event effect (SEE) cross section of modern electronic devices. This was experimentally observed for single-event upsets and single-event latchup. Rectangular parallelepiped (RPP) models built to fit proton data confirm the existence of the pion SEE cross-section resonance. The impact on current radiation hardness assurance (RHA) soft error rate (SER) predictions is, however, minimal for the accelerator environment since this is dominated by high neutron fluxes. The resonance is not seen to have a major impact on the high-energy hadron equivalence approximation established for testing in mixed-field facilities.