RADIOGRAPHIC CAPABILITIES OF THE MERCURY MONTE CARLO CODE

MERCURY is a modem, parallel, general-purpose Monte Carlo code being developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Recently, a radiographic capability has been added. MERCURY can create a source of diagnostic, virtual particles that are aimed at pixels in an image tally. This new feature is compared to the radiography code HADES for verification and timing. Comparisons for accuracy were made using the French Test Object and for timing were made by tracking through an unstructured mesh. In addition, self-consistency tests were run in MERCURY for the British Test Object and scattering test problem. MERCURY and HADES were found to agree to the precision of the input data. HADES appears to run around eight times faster than MERCURY in the timing study. Profiling the MERCURY code has turned up several differences in the algorithms that account for this. These differences will be addressed in a future release of MERCURY.