Including Delbrck scattering in GEANT4

Omer, M.  ; Hajima, Ryoichi*

Elastic scattering of -rays by an atom nearly associates all their interactions with matter. Therefore, the planning of experiments, involving measurements of -rays, using Monte Carlo simulations usually includes the elastic scattering. However, current simulation tools do not provide a complete picture of the elastic scattering. The majority of these tools assume Rayleigh scattering is the primary contributor to the elastic scattering and neglect other elastic scattering processes, such as nuclear Thomson and Delbrck scattering. Here, we develop a tabulation-based method to simulate elastic scattering in one of the most common open-source Monte Carlo simulation toolkits, GEANT4. We collectively include three processes, Rayleigh scattering, nuclear Thomson scattering, and Delbrck scattering. Our simulation more appropriately uses differential cross sections based on the second-order scattering matrix instead of current data, which is based on the form factor approximation. Moreover, the superposition of these processes is carefully taken into account emphasizing the complex nature of the scattering amplitudes. The simulation covers an energy range of 0.01 MeV E 3 MeV and all elements with the atomic numbers of 1 Z 99. In addition, we verified our simulation by comparing the differential cross section measured in earlier experiments to those extracted from the simulations. We find that the simulations are in good agreement with the experimental measurements. Differences between the experiments and the simulations are 21% for uranium, 24% for lead, 3% for tantalum, and 8% for cerium at 2.754 MeV. Coulomb corrections to the Delbrck amplitudes may account for the relatively large differences that appear at higher Z values.