On the new and accurate (Goudsmit-Saunderson) model for describing e-/e+ multiple Coulomb scattering (Geant4 Technical Note)

• Main Author: Novak, Mihaly
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 17.10.2025
• Subjects: Physics - Applied Physics; Physics - Computational Physics; Physics - Medical Physics
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2410.13361

A new model, for the accurate simulation of multiple Coulomb scattering (MSC) of e-/e+, has been implemented in Geant4 recently and made available with version Geant4-10.4. The model is based on Goudsmit-Saunderson (GS) angular distributions computed by utilising the screen Rutherford (SR) DCS and follows very closely the formulation developed by Kawrakow [1, 2] and utilised in the EGSnrc toolkit [3]. Corrections, for taking into accountenergy loss [2] neglected by the GS theory, spin-relativistic effects [3] not included in the SR but might be accounted on the basis of Mott DCS as well as the so-called scattering power correction [4], i.e. appropriately incorporating deflections due to sub-threshold delta ray productions, are all included similarly to the EGSnrc model [3]. Furthermore, an accurate electron-step algorithm [5, 6, 2] is utilised for path length correction, i.e. for calculating the post-step position in each condensed history simulation steps such that the corresponding single-scattering longitudinal and lateral (post step point) distributions are very well reproduced. An e-/e+ stepping algorithm, including the simulation step-limit due to the MSC and boundary crossing [2]), free from step-size artefacts, makes the model complete. Details on this new model, including all the above-mentioned components and corrections, are provided in this Geant4 technical note. It must be noted, that a Goudsmit-Saunderson model for MSC was available before Geant4-10.4., documented in [7], that has been completely replaced by the model described in this technical note (keeping only the G4GoudsmitSaundersonMscModel name of the C++ class from that previous version)