Molten salt reactors (MSRs) are one type of GEN-IV advanced reactors that adopt melt mixtures of heavy metal elements and molten salt as both fuel and coolant. The liquid fuel allows MSRs to perform online refueling, reprocessing, and helium bubbling. The fuel utilization, safety, and economics can be enhanced, while some new physical mechanisms and phenomena emerge simultaneously, which would significantly complicate the numerical simulation of MSRs. The dual roles of molten fuel salt in the core lead to a tighter coupling of physical mechanisms since the released fission energy will be absorbed immediately by the molten salt itself and then transferred to the primary heat exchanger. The modeling of multi-physics coupling is regarded as one important aspect of MSR study, attracting growing attention worldwide. Up to now, great efforts have been made in the development of MSR multi-physics coupling models over the past 60 years, especially after 2000, when MSR was selected for one of the GEN-IV advanced reactors. In this paper, the development status of the MSR multi-physics coupling model is extensively reviewed in the light of coupling models of N-TH (neutronics and thermal hydraulics), N-TH-BN (neutronics, thermal hydraulics, and burnup) and N-TH-BN-G (neutronics, thermal hydraulics, burnup, and graphite deformation). The problems, challenges, and development trends are outlined to provide a basis for the future development of MSR multi-physics coupling models.

Proton-neutron, neutron-neutron, and proton-proton momentum-correlation functions (Cpn,Cnn, and Cpp) are systematically investigated for 15C and other C-isotope-induced collisions at different entrance channel conditions within the framework of the isospin-dependent quantum-molecular-dynamics model complemented by the correlation after burner (crab) computation code. 15C is a prime exotic nucleus candidate due to the weakly bound valence neutron coupling with closed-neutron-shell nucleus 14C. To study density dependence of the correlation function by removing the isospin effect, the initialized 15C projectiles are sampled from two kinds of density distribution from the relativistic mean-field (RMF) model in which the valence neutron of 15C is populated in both 1d5/2 and 2s1/2 states, respectively. The results show that the density distributions of the valence neutron significantly influence the nucleon-nucleon momentum-correlation function at large impact parameters and high incident energies. The extended density distribution of the valence neutron largely weakens the strength of the correlation function. The size of the emission source is extracted by fitting the correlation function by using the Gaussian source method. The emission source size as well as the size of the final-state phase space are larger for projectile samplings from more extended density distributions of the valence neutron, which corresponds to the 2s1/2 state in the RMF model. Therefore, the nucleon-nucleon momentum-correlation function can be considered as a potentially valuable tool to diagnose exotic nuclear structures, such as the skin and halo.

The reaction dynamics of axisymmetric deformed Mg24+Mg24 collisions has been investigated systematically by an isospin-dependent quantum molecular dynamics model. It is found that different deformations and orientations result in apparently different properties of reaction dynamics. We reveal that some observables such as nuclear stopping power (R), multiplicity of fragments, and elliptic flow are very sensitive to the initial deformations and orientations. There exists an eccentricity scaling of elliptic flow in central body-body collisions with different deformations. In addition, the tip-tip and body-body configurations turn out to be two extreme cases in central reaction dynamical process.