About
TRAX
is a software package to simulate the interaction of
ions and electrons on a very basic level ("tracks") with the Monte Carlo method.
It is targeted at the simulation in the "low" energy region, important for
radiation transport in dosimetric devices and radiation damage to living systems
(cells, DNA). Hence its applicability is limited to ions with energies less than a few
hundred MeV/u and electrons
with less than a few MeV. Photon support might be added in a future release.
The lower threshold
is given by the available cross sections, at most between 1 and 10 eV.
In contrast to conventional simulation packages which follow more or less
the approach of condensed random walk and multiple scattering, as first introduced
by M.J.Berger (Meth, Comp. Phys. 1 (1961) ), TRAX
handles
each basic interaction separately.
This offers the opportunity to simulate radiation quantities like W-values,
specific energy depositions,
ionization distributions,
radial and depth dose distributions,
energy loss and energy loss straggling and such like
from bottom-up instead of requiring them as input data.
On the other hand, the single interaction approach is not very practical for the simulation of large volumes and complex geometries,
typically used for high energy physics setups.
Although in principle possible, the consumption of CPU resources would be excessive,
at least by today's standards.
Due to the long calculation times inherent in most simulation tasks
TRAX
has been designed as a command-line oriented program,
meant to be run mostly in batch mode.
Hence
TRAX
does not come with builtin graphics output and graphical user interfaces,
although these features might be added in the future.
TRAX
is operated by means of an own command and scripting language
and outputs its results as ASCII report and data files.
Generated track data can also be stored as binary (listmode) files to be analyzed
at a later stage.
Last updated: M.Kraemer,
$Id: traxintro.html,v 1.6 2016/03/02 14:34:14 kraemer Exp $
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