A Geiger counter is an electronic instrument used for detecting and measuring ionizing radiation. It is widely used in applications such as radiation dosimetry, radiological protection, experimental physics and the nuclear industry.
Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The underlying concept is to use randomness to solve problems that might be deterministic in principle. The name comes from the Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco, where the primary developer of the method, physicist Stanislaw Ulam, was inspired by his uncle's gambling habits.
Ionizing radiation, including nuclear radiation, consists of subatomic particles or electromagnetic waves that have sufficient energy to ionize atoms or molecules by detaching electrons from them. Some particles can travel up to 99% of the speed of light, and the electromagnetic waves are on the high-energy portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Geant4 is a platform for "the simulation of the passage of particles through matter" using Monte Carlo methods. It is the successor of the GEANT series of software toolkits developed by The Geant4 Collaboration, and the first to use object oriented programming. Its development, maintenance and user support are taken care by the international Geant4 Collaboration. Application areas include high energy physics and nuclear experiments, accelerator and space physics studies. The software is used by a number of research projects around the world.
Neutron transport is the study of the motions and interactions of neutrons with materials. Nuclear scientists and engineers often need to know where neutrons are in an apparatus, in what direction they are going, and how quickly they are moving. It is commonly used to determine the behavior of nuclear reactor cores and experimental or industrial neutron beams. Neutron transport is a type of radiative transport.
ROOT is an object-oriented computer program and library developed by CERN. It was originally designed for particle physics data analysis and contains several features specific to the field, but it is also used in other applications such as astronomy and data mining. The latest minor release is 6.28, as of 2023-02-03.
Gamma-ray spectroscopy is the qualitative study of the energy spectra of gamma-ray sources, such as in the nuclear industry, geochemical investigation, and astrophysics. Gamma-ray spectrometry, on the other hand, is the method used to acquire a quantitative spectrum measurement.
Transmission electron cryomicroscopy (CryoTEM), commonly known as cryo-EM, is a form of cryogenic electron microscopy, more specifically a type of transmission electron microscopy (TEM) where the sample is studied at cryogenic temperatures. Cryo-EM, specifically 3-dimensional electron microscopy (3DEM), is gaining popularity in structural biology.
Monte Carlo N-Particle Transport (MCNP) is a general-purpose, continuous-energy, generalized-geometry, time-dependent, Monte Carlo radiation transport code designed to track many particle types over broad ranges of energies and is developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory. Specific areas of application include, but are not limited to, radiation protection and dosimetry, radiation shielding, radiography, medical physics, nuclear criticality safety, detector design and analysis, nuclear oil well logging, accelerator target design, fission and fusion reactor design, decontamination and decommissioning. The code treats an arbitrary three-dimensional configuration of materials in geometric cells bounded by first- and second-degree surfaces and fourth-degree elliptical tori.
The EGS computer code system is a general purpose package for the Monte Carlo simulation of the coupled transport of electrons and photons in an arbitrary geometry for particles with energies from a few keV up to several hundreds of GeV. It originated at SLAC but National Research Council of Canada and KEK have been involved in its development since the early 80s.
FLUKA is a fully integrated Monte Carlo simulation package for the interaction and transport of particles and nuclei in matter. FLUKA has many applications in particle physics, high energy experimental physics and engineering, shielding, detector and telescope design, cosmic ray studies, dosimetry, medical physics, radiobiology. A recent line of development concerns hadron therapy.
The automatic calculation of particle interaction or decay is part of the computational particle physics branch. It refers to computing tools that help calculating the complex particle interactions as studied in high-energy physics, astroparticle physics and cosmology. The goal of the automation is to handle the full sequence of calculations in an automatic (programmed) way: from the Lagrangian expression describing the physics model up to the cross-sections values and to the event generator software.
A gamma ray, also known as gamma radiation (symbol γ or ), is a penetrating form of electromagnetic radiation arising from the radioactive decay of atomic nuclei. It consists of the shortest wavelength electromagnetic waves, typically shorter than those of X-rays. With frequencies above 30 exahertz (3×1019 Hz), it imparts the highest photon energy. Paul Villard, a French chemist and physicist, discovered gamma radiation in 1900 while studying radiation emitted by radium. In 1903, Ernest Rutherford named this radiation gamma rays based on their relatively strong penetration of matter; in 1900 he had already named two less penetrating types of decay radiation (discovered by Henri Becquerel) alpha rays and beta rays in ascending order of penetrating power.
EPCARD is a software program that calculates radiation exposure of aircrews. The software code is based on the FLUKA transport code. EPCARD allows calculation of a simulated dose from most important components of penetrating cosmic radiation on any aviation route and for any flight profile at altitudes from 5 to 25 km.
Quantemol Ltd is based in University College London initiated by Professor Jonathan Tennyson FRS and Dr. Daniel Brown in 2004. The company initially developed a unique software tool, Quantemol-N, which provides full accessibility to the highly sophisticated UK molecular R-matrix codes, used to model electron polyatomic molecule interactions. Since then Quantemol has widened to further types of simulation, with plasmas and industrial plasma tools, in Quantemol-VT in 2013 and launched in 2016 a sustainable database Quantemol-DB, representing the chemical and radiative transport properties of a wide range of plasmas.
Ecolego is a simulation software tool that is used for creating dynamic models and performing deterministic and probabilistic simulations. It is also used for conducting risk assessments of complex dynamic systems evolving over time.
Computational human phantoms are models of the human body used in computerized analysis. Since the 1960s, the radiological science community has developed and applied these models for ionizing radiation dosimetry studies. These models have become increasingly accurate with respect to the internal structure of the human body.
Archimedes is a TCAD package for use by engineers to design and simulate submicron and mesoscopic semiconductor devices. Archimedes is free software and thus it can be copied, modified and redistributed under GPL. Archimedes uses the Ensemble Monte Carlo method and is able to simulate physics effects and transport for electrons and heavy holes in Silicon, Germanium, GaAs, InSb, AlSb, AlAs, AlxInxSb, AlxIn(1-x)Sb, AlP, AlSb, GaP, GaSb, InP and their compounds, along with Silicon Oxide. Applied and/or self-consistent electrostatic and magnetic fields are handled with the Poisson and Faraday equations.
Xie George Xu was the Edward E. Hood Chair Professor of Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, New York, United States, before he relocated in 2020 to China and joined the faculty of the University of Science and Technology of China.
A charged particle accelerator is a complex machine that takes elementary charged particles and accelerates them to very high energies. Accelerator physics is a field of physics encompassing all the aspects required to design and operate the equipment and to understand the resulting dynamics of the charged particles. There are software packages associated with each domain. The 1990 edition of the Los Alamos Accelerator Code Group's compendium provides summaries of more than 200 codes. Certain codes are still in use today, although many are obsolete. Another index of existing and historical accelerator simulation codes is located at the CERN CARE/HHH website.
