Abstract:

We calculate the spectrum of photons resulting from electromagnetic cascades through thermal radiation, and examine the consequences of including triplet production in these cascades. We assume that the cascade is one-dimensional, and we find that this approximation is justified in the present work for thermal radiation with temperature less than 10^-3 mc². Results are obtained for both monoenergetic and power-law primary spectra, and for a variety of path lengths. We find that triplet production is particularly important in electron-photon cascades through thermal radiation when the primary energy exceeds 10⁵m²c⁴/kT for propagation over small path lengths. The importance of triplet production decreases as the path length increases, and it has no effect on saturated cascades.

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