Simulate Gamma Rays from Radioactive Decay

Marioqwe

Hello, I am trying to simulate the gammas from certain radioactive decays but I am really puzzle as to how to approach this. The site I'm using as a reference lists the intensities of the different gammas corresponding to an specific decay.

The thing that confuses me is that, for example, some intensities do not add up to 100; which is understandable since there might be more than one gamma emitted per decay. But then, how would one simulate this?

For example, Lets say I have X -> Y + gamma and lets say I have two different gammas, a and b, with intensities 50 and 60 respectively. Then, the way I think about it is that out of 100 decays, 50% of the time I get a, and 60% of the time I get b. But how does one tell a computer to do this?

It appears to me that normalizing the intensities wouldn't work and so throwing a single random number between 0 and 1 won't work. Is the best approach to just do a different random number for each intensity?

QuantumPion

If your question is how to make a computer program randomly pick between two options, the simplest solution would be something like:

real gamma,energy1,energy2,i
energy1=a
energy2=b
i = rand()
if i > 0.5 gamma=energy1 else gamma=energy2