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The EGS5 Code System

Hideo Hirayama, Yoshihito Namito, Alex F. Bielajew, S.J. Wilderman, U. Michigan, W.R. Nelson

2005

422 citations

Abstract

In the nineteen years since EGS4 was released, it has been used in a wide variety of applications, particularly in medical physics, radiation measurement studies, and industrial development. Every new user and every new application bring new challenges for Monte Carlo code designers, and code refinements and bug fixes eventually result in a code that becomes difficult to maintain. Several of the code modifications represented significant advances in electron and photon transport physics, and required a more substantial invocation than code patching. Moreover, the arcane MORTRAN3[48] computer language of EGS4, was highest on the complaint list of the users of EGS4. The size of the EGS4 user base is difficult to measure, as there never existed a formal user registration process. However, some idea of the numbers may be gleaned from the number of EGS4 manuals that were produced and distributed at SLAC: almost three thousand. Consequently, the EGS5 project was undertaken. It was decided to employ the FORTRAN 77 compiler, yet include as much as possible, the structural beauty and power of MORTRAN3. This report consists of four chapters and several appendices. Chapter 1 is an introduction to EGS5 and to this report in general. We suggest that you read it. Chapter 2 is a major update of similar chapters in the old EGS4 report[126] (SLAC-265) and the old EGS3 report[61] (SLAC-210), in which all the details of the old physics (i.e., models which were carried over from EGS4) and the…

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