Practical aspects of Monte Carlo simulation of charged particle transport: Mixed algorithms and variance reduction techniques

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the practical implementation of Monte Carlo simulation methods for charged particle transport. The emphasis is on light particles (electrons and positrons) because of the larger scattering and energy straggling effects. Differential cross sections (DCS) for the various interaction mechanisms are described. As the average number of interactions along the particle track increases with the initial energy, detailed simulation becomes unfeasible at high energies. We can then rely on mixed simulation algorithms: hard events (i.e. individual interactions with angular deflection or energy loss larger than given cutoff values) are sampled from the DCS whereas soft events are simulated by means of a multiple scattering approach. Too frequently, the statistical uncertainty of analogue simulation (i.e. strict simulation of the physical interaction process) is found to be so large that results are meaningless. This problem can be partially solved by applying simple variance reduction techniques.