A Monte Carlo approach to the direct simulation of electron penetration in solids

Abstract

A new Monte Carlo approach to the direct simulation of scattering process of a penetrating electron in matter has been attempted. The theoretical stopping powers for elementary excitation processes (conduction-electron, plasmon and L-shell electron excitations) were used instead of Bethe's stopping power equation to describe the energy loss process in the electron penetration. The result obtained for aluminium describes the energy as well as the angular distribution of the transmitted electrons satisfactorily. This approach has also been applied to copper as a preliminary example. The theory describes qualitatively the energy and angular distributions of the transmitted electrons fairly well, but there is some discrepancy between theory and experiment in the energy distribution.