A SIMPLIFIED METHOD FOR THE DETAILED MONTE-CARLO SIMULATION OF ELECTRON-TRANSPORT

A detailed simulation of electron transport in condensed materials is considered from an unconventional point of view. The basic ingredient of the approach presented is the well known fact that multiple scattering distributions are mainly sensitive to a few average quantities, namely the mean free paths and the first and second moments of the elastic and inelastic differential cross sections. These characteristic functions are assumed to be known and are introduced in the simulation code as input data characterizing the scattering medium. Angular deflections and energy losses are sampled from artificial probability distributions which reproduce the input values of the characteristic functions and allow the random generation of the involved variables in an easy way. The reliability of this scheme is demonstrated by comparing the simulation results, for transmission and backscattering of keV electron beams through aluminium and gold foils, with those from a detailed Monte Carlo code which uses realistic differential cross sections.