A random walk approach to the diffusion of positrons in gaseous media

Published in Eur. Phys. J. D, 2013

Recommended citation: M. Girardi-Schappo, W. Tenfen, F. Arretche (2013): A random walk approach to the diffusion of positrons in gaseous media. Eur. Phys. J. D 67: 123. https://dx.doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2013-20508-2

In this work, we present a random walk model to study the positron diffusion in gaseous media. The positron-atom interaction is described through positron-target cross sections. The main idea is to obtain how much energy a positron transfer to the environment atoms, through ionizations and electronic excitations until its annihilation, taking the ratio between each energetically available collision channel to the total one as the probability for each process to occur. As a first application, we studied how the positron diffuse in gases of helium, neon, argon and their mixtures. To characterize the positron dynamics in each system, we calculated the radiation profile generated from the annihilation, their diffusion profiles and the most probable distances for excitation and ionization.