Component Manual for the Xray-Tracing Package McXtrace, version 3.8.6

2  Monte Carlo Techniques and simulation strategy

This chapter explains the simulation strategy and the Monte Carlo techniques used in McXtrace. We first explain the concept of the x-ray weight factor, and discuss the statistical errors in dealing with sums of x-ray weights. Secondly, we give an expression for how the weight factor transforms under a Monte Carlo choice and specialize this to the concept of direction focusing. Finally, we present a way of generating random numbers with arbitrary distributions. More details are available in the Appendix concerning random numbers in the User manual.

2.1 X-ray simulations
2.1.1 Monte Carlo ray tracing simulations
2.2 The x-ray weight
2.2.1 Statistical errors of non-integer counts
2.3 Weight factor transformations during a Monte Carlo choice
2.3.1 Direction focusing
2.4 Stratified sampling
2.5 Accuracy of Monte Carlo simulations