Validation of Geant4-based Radioactive Decay Simulation

TL;DR

This paper validates the accuracy of Geant4's radioactive decay simulation module, comparing per-decay and statistical sampling methods against experimental measurements without calibration, demonstrating comparable simulation accuracy.

Contribution

It provides a validation of Geant4's radioactive decay simulation, including an extended package with statistical sampling, against experimental data.

Findings

Both sampling methods achieve similar accuracy in simulations.

Validation shows Geant4 can reliably simulate radioactive decays without calibration.

The extended package supports multiple sampling approaches.

Abstract

Radioactive decays are of concern in a wide variety of applications using Monte-Carlo simulations. In order to properly estimate the quality of such simulations, knowledge of the accuracy of the decay simulation is required. We present a validation of the original Geant4 Radioactive Decay Module, which uses a per-decay sampling approach, and of an extended package for Geant4-based simulation of radioactive decays, which, in addition to being able to use a refactored per-decay sampling, is capable of using a statistical sampling approach. The validation is based on measurements of calibration isotope sources using a high purity Germanium (HPGe) detector; no calibration of the simulation is performed. For the considered validation experiment equivalent simulation accuracy can be achieved with per-decay and statistical sampling.