A method to efficiently simulate absorbed dose in radio-sensitive instrumentation components

Abstract

Components installed in tunnels of high-power accelerators are prone to radiation-induced damage and malfunction. Such machines are usually modeled in detail and the radiation cascades are transported through the three-dimensional models in Monte Carlo codes. Very often those codes are used to compute energy deposition in beam components or radiation fields to the public and the environment. However, sensitive components such as electronic boards or insulator cables are less easily simulated, as their small size makes dose scoring a (statistically) inefficient process. Moreover the process to decide their location is iterative, as in order to define where these will be safely installed, the dose needs to be computed, but to do so the location needs to be known. This note presents a different approach to indirectly asses the potential absorbed dose by certain components when those are installed within a given radiation field. The method consists first in finding the energy and particle-dependent absorbed dose to fluence response function, and then programming those in a radiation transport Monte Carlo code, so that fluences in vacuum/air can be automatically converted real-time into potential absorbed doses and then mapped in the same way as fluences or dose equivalent magnitudes.