Abstract
The purpose of this study is to provide detailed characteristics of incident photon beams for different field sizes and beam energies. This information is critical to the future development of accurate treatment planning systems. It also enhances our knowledge of radiotherapy photon beams. The EGS4 Monte Carlo code, BEAM, has been used to simulate 6 and 18 MV photon beams from a Varian Clinac-2100EX accelerator. A simulated realistic beam is stored in a phase space data file, which contains details of each particle's complete history including where it has been and where it has interacted. The phase space files are analysed to obtain energy spectra, angular distribution, fluence profile and mean energy profiles at the phantom surface for particles separated according to their charge and history. The accuracy of a simulated beam is validated by the excellent agreement between the Monte Carlo calculated and measured dose distributions. Measured depth–dose curves are obtained from depth–ionization curves by accounting for newly introduced chamber fluence corrections and the stopping-power ratios for realistic beams. The study presents calculated depth–dose components from different particles as well as calculated surface dose and contribution from different particles to surface dose across the field. It is shown that the increase of surface dose with the increase of the field size is mainly due to the increase of incident contaminant charged particles. At 6 MV, the incident charged particles contribute 7% to 21% of maximum dose at the surface when the field size increases from 10 × 10 to 40 × 40 cm2. At 18 MV, their contributions are up to 11% and 29% of maximum dose at the surface for 10 × 10 cm2 and 40 × 40 cm2 fields respectively. However, the fluence of these incident charged particles is less than 1% of incident photon fluence in all cases.