Monte Carlo methods are widely used for radiation transport because they can model detailed particle physics and continuous energy interactions through complex geometries. This talk will discuss two distinct areas of Monte Carlo radiation transport research: Residual Monte Carlo methods for neutron transport and multiscale Monte Carlo modeling of radiation effects in electronics.

The first part focuses on the development of a Residual Monte Carlo algorithm for solving the neutron transport equation with continuous energy physics. Residual Monte Carlo uses an approximate solution to solve for the error between the approximate and exact solutions, which can reduce variance and enable an iterative process known as Exponentially Convergent Monte Carlo. Previous Residual Monte Carlo work has been limited primarily to monoenergetic and multigroup formulations. This limitation is significant because continuous energy physics is one of the primary reasons Monte Carlo methods are used for neutron transport. I will discuss the extension of Residual Monte Carlo into continuous energy neutron transport.

The second part discusses recent work on multiscale Monte Carlo modeling of radiation effects in electronics. This work couples system-scale radiation transport simulations with high-fidelity device-scale radiation effects simulations to study how shielding, packaging, and local material structure affect energy deposition and radiation-induced damage in sensitive electronic regions.

BIO: Massimo Larsen is a postdoctoral scholar in the School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University. He received his Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from Oregon State University, where his dissertation focused on developing residual Monte Carlo methods for continuous energy neutron transport. He received his B.S. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. During his graduate studies, he was a year-round Graduate Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the XCP-3 Monte Carlo Codes group, where he worked on Monte Carlo radiation transport methods and high performance computing applications.