Monte Carlo X-ray Scattering Studies in the MeV Regime

A study is shown which is performed to enhance an existing deterministic X-ray simulation method for nondestructive testing applications by including the effect of pair production and annihilation. Therefore, a Monte Carlo simulation tool was used to perform parameter studies. Several materials from polyvinyl chloride to lead and of different lengths were simulated with 109 monoenergetic photons per simulation run. These were used to quantify and evaluate the radial distribution of scattered photons for each length, material and energy as a function of the scattering angle. The results indicate that the radiation originating from the electron-positronannihilation and thus from the pair generation is one major contributor to the total deposited energy only for certain angular ranges whereas for other angles Compton is by far the leading scattering effect. Furthermore, the results indicate that the electron-positron-annihilation radiation is negligible for most imaging tasks and thus unimportant for deterministic scattering simulations.