An Assessment of Existing Klein-Nishina Monte Carlo Sampling Methods

Several methods for sampling the Klein-Nishina distributions for scattered photon secondary energy are studied to determine an optimum sampling technique useful from 1 keV to 100 MeV. A commonly used approximate inverse method is evaluated for accuracy by analytically comparing the exact and approximate sampling distributions. This method, several rejection methods, and an exact direct sampling method are evaluated for computing speed on several different computers.