Response decomposition with Monte Carlo correlated coupling

Particle histories that contribute to a detector response are categorized according to whether they are fully confined inside a source-detector enclosure or cross and recross the same enclosure. The contribution from the confined histories is expressed using a forward problem with the external boundary condition on the source-detector enclosure. The contribution from the crossing and recrossing histories is expressed as the surface integral at the same enclosure of the product of the directional cosine and the fluxes in the foregoing forward problem and the adjoint problem for the whole spatial domain. The former contribution can be calculated by a standard forward Monte Carlo. The latter contribution can be calculated by correlated coupling of forward and adjoint histories independently of the former contribution. We briefly describe the computational method and discuss its application to perturbation analysis for localized material changes. (orig.)