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Radial Moment Calculations of Coupled Electron-Photon Beams

Franke, Brian C.

The authors consider the steady-state transport of normally incident pencil beams of radiation in slabs of material. A method has been developed for determining the exact radial moments of 3-D beams of radiation as a function of depth into the slab, by solving systems of 1-D transport equations. They implement these radial moment equations in the ONEBFP discrete ordinates code and simulate energy-dependent, coupled electron-photon beams using CEPXS-generated cross sections. Modified P{sub N} synthetic acceleration is employed to speed up the iterative convergence of the 1-D charged particle calculations. For high-energy photon beams, a hybrid Monte Carlo/discrete ordinates method is examined. They demonstrate the efficiency of the calculations and make comparisons with 3-D Monte Carlo calculations. Thus, by solving 1-D transport equations, they obtain realistic multidimensional information concerning the broadening of electron-photon beams. This information is relevant to fields such as industrial radiography, medical imaging, radiation oncology, particle accelerators, and lasers.