The Landau Distribution

M. MARUCHO, C.A. GARCIA CANAL, H. FANCHIOTTI

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MODERN PHYSICS C

Año: 2006 vol. 17 p. 1461 - 1477

0129-1831

The Landau distribution as well as its first and second momenta are well suited for describing the energy loss of charged particles traversing a thin layer of matter. At present, just rational approximations and asymptotic expressions for these functions were obtained. In this paper we present a direct calculation of the integral representation of these funcions obtaining perturbative and nonperturbative solutions expressed in terms of last convergent series. We also provide a simple numerical algorithm which allows to control speed and precision of the results. The testing runs have provided, in reasonable computing times, correct results up to 13-14 significant digits on the density and distribution functions and 9-10 on the first and second momenta. If necessary, this accuracy could be improved by adding more coefficients to the algorithm.