A discrete method for anisotropic angular sampling in Monte Carlo simulations (Q1105345)

Recognizing that the scoring accuracy is often limited by the angular sampling procedure for simulations involving highly anisotropic scattering, the authors develop a new discrete angular sampling method. This method is based on matching the first N moments of a given continuous angular scattering PDF with the first N moments of a discrete PDF consisting of a sequence of N Dirac spikes. The accuracy of Monte Carlo simulation increases with N. It is shown that the proposed discrete angular sampling method works best for highly forward peaked scattering with a high albedo. Even though both discrete method and tabular method require computational effort, the discrete method is slightly faster and more flexible than the tabular method.