A combined approach of variance-reduction techniques for the efficient Monte Carlo simulation of linacs.

A method based on a combination of the variance-reduction techniques of particle splitting and Russian roulette is presented. This method improves the efficiency of radiation transport through linear accelerator geometries simulated with the Monte Carlo method. The method named as 'splitting-roulette' was implemented on the Monte Carlo code [Formula: see text] and tested on an Elekta linac, although it is general enough to be implemented on any other general-purpose Monte Carlo radiation transport code and linac geometry. Splitting-roulette uses any of the following two modes of splitting: simple splitting and 'selective splitting'. Selective splitting is a new splitting mode based on the angular distribution of bremsstrahlung photons implemented in the Monte Carlo code [Formula: see text]. Splitting-roulette improves the simulation efficiency of an Elekta SL25 linac by a factor of 45.