Adding the X-ray Bragg Reflection Physical Process in Crystal to the Geant4 Monte Carlo Simulation Toolkit, Part I: Reflection From a Crystal Slab

Authors

Fada Guan
Makoto Asai
Dirk A Bartkoski
Michael Kleckner
Ze'ev Harel
Mohammad Salehpour

Publication Date

3-1-2023

Journal

Precision Radiation Oncology

Abstract

X-ray diffraction from a solid crystal shows the wave nature of photons. It is an important electromagnetic (EM) physics process when X-ray photons interact with a crystal. Bragg diffraction, often called Bragg reflection, is a special case of the general form of X-ray diffraction, known as Laue diffraction. When the Bragg's law is met, the incident photon beam is reflected from the crystal plane behaving as a specular reflection at the Bragg angle. However, the Bragg reflection physical process has not been integrated into the general-purpose Monte Carlo simulation toolkit Geant4 for particle physics. In the current study, we developed a new EM physical process class "G4CrystalBraggReflection" and a new EM physical model class "G4DarwinDynamicalModel" for modeling the Bragg reflection physical process within a crystal. We added the Bragg reflection physical process to the EM physics category of Geant4. The preliminary results of photon tracking in a silicon crystal slab have shown the feasibility of simulating the Bragg reflection process in addition to the standard EM processes in the framework of Geant4.

Keywords

Bragg reflection, Geant4, Monte Carlo, X‐ray, crystal

DOI

10.1002/pro6.1188

PMID

40336621

PMCID

PMC11935221

PubMedCentral® Posted Date

2-26-2023

PubMedCentral® Full Text Version

Post-print

Published Open-Access

yes