Abstract
The field of Atomic and Molecular Physics (AMP) is a mature field exploring the spectroscopy, excitation, ionisation of atoms and molecules in all three phases. Understanding of the spectroscopy and collisional dynamics of AMP has been fundamental to the development and application of quantum mechanics and is applied across a broad range of disparate disciplines including atmospheric sciences, astrochemistry, combustion and environmental science, and in central to core technologies such as semiconductor fabrications, nanotechnology and plasma processing. In recent years the molecular physics also started significantly contributing to the area of the radiation damage at molecular level and thus cancer therapy improvement through both experimental and theoretical advances, developing new damage measurement and analysis techniques. It is therefore worth to summarise and highlight the most prominent findings from the AMP community that contribute towards better understanding of the fundamental processes in biologically-relevant systems as well as to comment on the experimental challenges that were met for more complex investigation targets.
Highlights
Development of generation radiation therapyIn developed countries cancer is the second most common form of death after cardiovascular disease
Radiotherapy is limited by the side effects it induces in the surrounding healthy tissues and/or the damage it can cause to vital organs
Using an alternative method for SSBs quantification, it was shown that the formation of one double strand breaks (DSBs) in a DNA molecule in an aqueous solution upon VUV irradiation and subsequent hydroxyl radical attack appears to be due to two independent SSBs being formed within approximately 43 bp rather than as a result of a single event
Summary
In developed countries cancer is the second most common form of death after cardiovascular disease. Using a binomial distribution to describe the probability of causing either a SSB or a DSB by a single projectile and, as a consequence of a moderate magnitude of successful events, approximating the probability with a Poisson distribution it is possible to obtain a set of simplified expressions describing changes in the average numbers of supercoiled, NS, relaxed, NR, and linear, NL, DNA molecules upon irradiation Such a simplification can be used in case of low PS values and it was shown that for investigations of hydroxyl radical attack [55] that this condition was fulfilled, the model may be implemented for DNA damage modelling. This is a physical phenomenon-based analysis of the situation that leads to radiation damage and was designed to consider all relevant effects on a variety of size and time scales and to develop an approach to the quantitative assessment of biological damage, including chemical effects in the irradiated system
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