Authors
Abstract
Monte Carlo simulation is widely used in calculations involing transport of photons through different materials of different shapes. The method consists of randomly generating a finite set of photon histories over which the quantities of interest are averaged. In photon transport calculations, sampling the photon scattering angle from the Klein-Nishina probability distribution is of special importance. Various methods of sampling the Klein-Nishina distribution exist in the literature which are mainly based either on approximate inverse sampling or non-uniform rejection sampling methods. A direct sampling method also exists which can only be used if the incident photon energy is greater than 1.4 MeV. In this work a weighting method for considering the Klein-Nishina distribution for the scanttering angle is presented, which is more accurate and faster than all other existing methods and is applicable for all incident photon energies. In this method an angle θ (0≤ θ ≤ Π ) is randomly generated at each scattering point and a weight W, which is proportional to the Klein-Nishina function at the generated , is calculated, and each event is weighted by the amount W. Events with multiple interactions are weghted by multiplication of the weights obtained at each scattering point. Using this method, the photon absorbed fraction , which is simply the fraction of the emitted photon energy that is absorbed in the region of interest, was calculated for central point sources in water spheres of different dimensions, and the results were compared with the results obtained by other methods. The consistency of the results shows that the weighting method presented here can efficiently be used in photon transport calculations.
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