In formula () above
the critical
scattering angle defined as:
with
The variable is factorised into two parts. The first part, , is a constant of the medium for a given incident particle. The second part depends on the incident particle energy and on the path length in the medium.
The variable CHC or CHCMOL stored in Q(JPROB+25) corresponds to . B is defined by the equation
where can be interpreted as the number of collisions in the step:
Here is Euler's constant ( ) and the atomic electron screening angle. For a single element this is given by:
where
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so that we have
For a compound/mixture the following rule holds:
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To understand the transformations in the above formulae, the following should be noted. Let be the number of atoms of type i in a compound/mixture, that is the number of moles of element i in a mole of material, and the proportion by weight of that element. We have the following relation:
so that we can simplify expressions in the following way:
If now we set
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we can write:
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and finally:
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The quantity is calculated during initialisation by the routine GMOLI setting and . This variable is called OMC or OMCMOL and it is stored in Q(JPROB+21). It has, via the atomic electron screening angle , a small dependence on and in the term . The quantity
is re-evaluated during tracking by the routine GMOLIO, called by GMULTS, only when necessary.
The dependence of on and is via a term of the form: , so it is not necessary to recalculate it as long as that is:
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For mixtures/compounds this condition should be checked for every component and this would be unacceptable from the point of view of computer time. So we simply make the condition more restrictive multiplying the first term by the number of elements in the mixture/compound.