Experimental verification of NOVICE transport code predictions of electron distributions from targets

This paper reports the results of experiments that were designed to check the validity of the NOVICE Adjoint Monte Carlo Transport code in predicting emission-electron distributions from irradiated targets. Previous work demonstrated that the code accurately calculated total electron yields from irradiated targets. In this investigation, a gold target was irradiated by X-rays with effective quantum energies of 79, 127, 174, 216, and 250 keV. Spectra of electrons from the target were measured for an incident photon angle of 45°, an emission-electron polar angle of 45°, azimuthal angles of 0° and 180°, and in both the forward and backward directions. NOVICE was used to predict those electron-energy-distributions for the same set of experimental conditions. The agreement in shape of the theoretical and experimental distributions was good, whereas the absolute agreement in amplitude was within about a factor of 2 over most of the energy range of the spectra. Previous experimental and theoretical comparisons together with these results show that the code can be used to simulate the generation physics of those distributions.