Problem 1331

Summary: G4PhotoNuclearProcess
Product: Geant4 Reporter: michel.maire
Component: processes/hadronic/processesAssignee: dennis.herbert.wright
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX    
Severity: normal    
Priority: P5    
Version: 9.5   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   

Description michel.maire 2012-07-01 13:06:58 CEST
sometime (few percent ?) the process is responsible for the step, but no interaction occurs.
Comment 1 dennis.herbert.wright 2012-07-04 02:40:05 CEST
Running tests now.
Comment 2 dennis.herbert.wright 2012-07-05 20:37:59 CEST
I have reproduced the problem.  For 10 MeV gammas on 100Mo, I get no interaction 7% of the time.  As I raise the energy to 15 MeV, this problem goes away, and all appears to fine.

The problem is that at these low energies all the gamma-nucleon cross sections on which the Bertini cascade is based are zero.  The only non-zero cross sections are the quasi-deuteron ones, where a gamma is absorbed on a nucleon pair.  As the projectile energy goes below 15 MeV, the nucleons from the quasi-deuteron absorption are less likely to rise above the nuclear potential.  When that happens, the precompound and de-excitation models are called which may or may not produce secondaries.   If no secondaries can be produced after several tries, Bertini returns a "no interaction".

This is the designed behavior of the model and therefore not a bug.

To improve the situation would require a hadronic model of gammma-nuclear reactions in which the nucleus is treated coherently.  I believe this would have to be a data-driven model much like HP neutrons.