Distributions of deposited energy and ionization clusters around ion tracks studied with Geant4 toolkit

Abstract

The Geant4-based Monte Carlo model for Heavy-Ion Therapy (MCHIT) was extended to study the patterns of energy deposition at sub-micrometer distance from individual ion tracks. Dose distributions for low-energy 1H, 4He, 12C and 16O ions measured in several experiments are well described by the model in a broad range of radial distances, from 0.5 to 3000 nm. Despite the fact that such distributions are characterized by long tails, a dominant fraction of deposited energy (∼80%) is confined within a radius of about 10 nm. The probability distributions of clustered ionization events in nanoscale volumes of water traversed by 1H, 2H, 4He, 6Li, 7Li, and 12C ions are also calculated. A good agreement of calculated ionization cluster-size distributions with the corresponding experimental data suggests that the extended MCHIT can be used to characterize stochastic processes of energy deposition to sensitive cellular structures.