Effective sampling of electron energy distributions using higher order sampling and spline function

A novel method for sampling an electron energy distribution with good statistics in Monte Carlo simulations (MCS) using Higher Order Sampling and a spline function is developed. The electron energy distributions f(ϵ) obtained by the developed method are in excellent agreement with those obtained by conventional sampling methods in equilibrium and nonequilibrium regions. The sampling method is extended to two dimensional, and applied to the sampling of the spatial variation of the energy distribution f(ϵ, x) in a steady-state Townsend experiment. The obtained energy distributions are in good agreement with those resulting from the conventional method. We found that the traced electron number in an MCS can be reduced to one-tenth of the conventional method by using the developed sampling method. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn, 94(12): 22–28, 2011; Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/ecj.10349