Monte Carlo:

Example output from "mc321.c"

The computer program mc321.c produces the data displayed in the following figure. The relative fluence rate F/P_o [cm^-2], the fluence rate per W of source power P_o from an isotropic point source at the origin, is plotted as a function of the distance from the source, r [cm]. The following figure shows data generated by launching 100,000 photons which required 5 min to run on a personal computer (G3 PowerMac). The optical properties were µ_a = 1 cm^-1, µ_s = 100 cm^-1, and g = 0.90.

The statistical noise becomes significant when F/P_o has dropped to 0.0001 at about a 2-cm distance from the source.