Non-forward radiative corrections to electron-carbon scattering

Abstract

Radiative corrections to elastic scattering represent an important part of the interpretation of electron-induced nuclear reactions at small energy transfers, where they represent a dominant part of the background. Here we present and validate a new event generator for simulating QED radiative processes in electron-carbon scattering that exactly calculates the coherent sum of the Bethe-Heitler amplitudes for the leading diagrams. We demonstrate that the generator describes the shape of the radiative tail of an elastic peak with a precision better than 10% over the whole energy range of the scattered electrons and can thus be reliably employed in the analyses of electron scattering experiments for more precise extraction of inelastic cross-sections.