Counting optical photons from scintillation events

To convince myself that I am implementing non-proportional scintillation yield correctly I plan on replicating figure 2 in The light yield nonproportionality component of scintillator energy resolution | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore by counting optical photons produced by electrons which are part of a chain where the primary at some point underwent photoelectric absorption. Results are separated based on final interaction type after the simulation is complete. For this I want to make sure that I am even counting optical photons correctly.

To build up to this I setup a linear yield case and defined the resolution scale to be zero so that I could observe the total yield lines corresponding to which shells that the primary gamma interacted when scattering or being absorbed.

However, I recorded more photons in some cases than should have been possible for my setup (yield=54 photon/keV, resolutionscale=0) as well as not seeing discrete lines
image
Redline show the maximum number of optical photons I think should ever be produced, 54*(primary energy=662keV), my code used to snag the output was

G4bool ScintillatorSD::ProcessHits(G4Step *aStep, G4TouchableHistory *ROhist)
{
    const G4String& PostProcessName = 
    aStep->GetPostStepPoint()->GetProcessDefinedStep()->GetProcessName();
    const G4double& DeltaEnergy = 
    aStep->GetDeltaEnergy(); 

    G4Track *track = aStep->GetTrack();
    
    auto secTrack = aStep->GetSecondaryInCurrentStep();
    G4double secSize = (*secTrack).size();

    G4ParticleDefinition* particle = track->GetDefinition();
    const G4String& particleName = particle->GetParticleName();
    
    // Call analysis manager
    G4CsvAnalysisManager *man = G4CsvAnalysisManager::Instance();
    
    // If the particle is a primary, save interaction type, this is how I sort
    // my data later.
    if (track->GetTrackID() == 1) {
        if(DeltaEnergy < 0) {
            // Save event ID
            man->FillNtupleIColumn(0, 0, G4RunManager::GetRunManager()->GetCurrentEvent()->GetEventID());
            // If Photoelectric save 1
            if (PostProcessName == "phot") {     
                man->FillNtupleIColumn(0, 1, 1);
            }
            // If Not photoelectric save 0
            else{
                man->FillNtupleIColumn(0, 1, 0);
            }
            man->AddNtupleRow(0);
        }

    // Not a primary, check if it is an electron
    } else if (particleName == "e-") {
        // check if there was any energy loss
        if(DeltaEnergy < 0) {
            // Now start counting the number of secondary optical photons
            G4int numoptical = 0;
            // Loop through all secondaries
            for (int i=0; i<secSize; i++){
                G4String secondaryName = (*secTrack)[i]->GetDefinition()->GetParticleName();
                // Increment counter if secondary is an optical photon
                if (secondaryName=="opticalphoton"){
                    numoptical = numoptical + 1;
                }
            }
            // save event ID and number of optical photons
            man->FillNtupleIColumn(1, 0, G4RunManager::GetRunManager()->GetCurrentEvent()->GetEventID());
            man->FillNtupleDColumn(1, 1, numoptical);
            man->AddNtupleRow(1);
        // Kill secondary electron
        //track->SetTrackStatus(fStopAndKill);      
        }  
    }
    return true;
}

Now if I kill my electrons after their first step, I do see discrete lines as I expect, maybe because what I see are the results of photons produced by electrons which gave up energy in one step
CountedPhotonPlotKill
So my question is this, am I double counting optical photons causing the yield to not be located at discrete locations, or is this a product of how the optical photons are produced in Geant4?

1 Like

This may be because, when the mean number of optical photons in a step is <= 10, the actual number is drawn from a Poission distribution.

https://geant4.kek.jp/lxr/source/processes/electromagnetic/xrays/src/G4Scintillation.cc#L422

  if(MeanNumberOfPhotons > 10.)
  {
    G4double sigma = ResolutionScale * std::sqrt(MeanNumberOfPhotons);
    fNumPhotons = G4int(G4RandGauss::shoot(MeanNumberOfPhotons, sigma) + 0.5);
  }
  else
  {
    fNumPhotons = G4int(G4Poisson(MeanNumberOfPhotons));
  }

RESOLUTIONSCALE doesn’t affect this.

2 Likes

Thanks for the reply! I do observe that the steps a electron takes where the released number of optical photons were less than 10 occurs on the order of 1e1, so this seems the likely answer for why I observe the deviations. And now I can have a bit more confidence that I am counting my optical photons correctly!

Hey! I was also simulating a scintillator but my physics processes are only printing Transportation and OpAbsorption. Can tell where it is wrong ?

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