Abstract
A Monte Carlo method previously developed has been applied to simulate the interaction of photons with CsI over the energy range from 50 eV to ~ 1 MeV and the subsequent electron cascades, as well as various quantum mechanical processes. The MC model has been employed to investigate the creation and nano-scale spatial distribution of electron-hole pairs and to calculate important intrinsic properties, including the W value, which is the mean energy required to produce an electron-hole pair, and the Fano factor. At energies lower than 10 keV, W generally decreases with increasing photon energy from 19 to 15 eV, whereas it saturates to 15 eV for higher energies. However, W exhibits a sawtooth variation, and discontinuities at the shell edges that follow the photoionization cross sections. The Fano factor, F, generally increases with increasing energy, and has a value of 0.28 at energies higher than 10 keV. The decrease of W value up to 10 keV may account for the initial rise in relative light yield with incident energy, as observed in experiments in CsI, and this suggests that the nonlinearity at low energy range may be associated with intrinsic properties of materials. Also, the spatial distribution of e-h pairs shows that the e-h pairs are primarily distributed along fast electron tracks in CsI, but the density of electron-hole pairs is low. A significant number of electron-hole pairs are produced through the different ionization channels of core shells and corresponding relaxation processes, which may provide an explanation why the Fano factor in CsI is larger than that in Si or Ge. The spatial distribution and density of thermalized electron-hole pairs along the primary and secondary tracks are important for large scale simulations of electron-hole pair transport.