Implementation of linearly-polarized photon scattering into the EGS4 code

Abstract A modification to the general-purpose Monte Carlo electron-photon transport code EGS4 [Nelson, Hirayama and Rogers, SLAC-265] was made in order to include linear polarization in the simulation of photon scattering. Both the Compton and Rayleigh scattering routines were modified to properly account for the electric-field vector of the photon. This vector is calculated at each photon scatter, and is passed along with the photons in the radiation transport, thereby allowing for a precise simulation of polarized multiple scattering. A simulation of the absorbed-dose distribution in a soft tissue equivalent phantom for a linearly polarized incident photon beam, scattering many times, was successfully performed.