CompScat: Python package for Compton Scattering simulation for educational purposes
By Aman Desai
Compton scattering is the process in which an incident photon scatters with a stationary electron. Owing to its simplicity, Compton Scattering remains one of the processes introduced to High school students as well as to early undergraduates. Particle Physics textbooks also use this process as a means to explain the underlying calculations in Quantum Electrodynamics. We introduce a python software, called CompScat which can evaluate cross-section of $\gamma e^{-} \rightarrow \gamma e^-$ processes (with electron at rest) as well as simulate the process. The main idea behind the development of this tool is to enable the High Energy Physics (HEP) analysis of this process in a popular data format (csv, root). The results of this tool have been compared and tested against that of Madgraph5amc_NLO, which is a professional Monte Carlo event generator used by the HEP community. The package comes with example notebooks which can be found at this LINK. The package also comes along with plotting tools to facilitate the visualization of kinematic distributions of the final state photon and electron. Some exercises are provided. The package is available for installation via the terminal command: pip install compscat.
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