INELASTIC ELECTRONIC COLLISION CROSS-SECTIONS FOR MONTE-CARLO CALCULATIONS

For very thin absorbers, the energy losses of fast charged particles vary widely because of the stochastic nature of the interactions. In order to visualize and understand this process, a simulation with Monte Carlo calculations can be used. The distributions functions needed in these calculations, describing the electronic energy losses in single collisions of fast charged particles traversing silicon, have been found to depend only slightly on particle speed. This simplifies such calculations. A similar behaviour is expected to exist for other materials.