A Monte Carlo simulation method for polarized gamma-ray nuclear resonance fluorescence

With the rapid development of inverse Compton scattering gamma-ray sources, highly polarized gamma rays play a significant role in fundamental nuclear physics research based on nuclear resonance fluorescence (NRF). To meet the requirements of those applications, especially for guiding experiments and optimizing detection systems, a Monte Carlo simulation method for linearly polarized gamma-ray NRF is developed and implemented in the general-purpose toolkit Geant4. To validate the effectiveness of this method, simulations are compared with both theoretical and experimental results and are found to agree well with both. As a typical application of the linearly polarized gamma-ray NRF technique, a gamma-ray polarization measurement method is proposed in the energy region from hundreds of keV to several MeV, and its feasibility is analyzed based on the developed simulation method. Compared with the conventional Compton scattering method, the analyzing power of the NRF method is improved about 3.7-fold by using a 28Si target, and reaches a value of more than 0.99 at a reasonable data acquisition time.