Nuclear fragmentation measurements for hadrontherapy and space radiation protection

Abstract

Nuclear fragmentation measurements are necessary in hadrontherapy and space radiation protection, to predict the effects of the ion nuclear interactions within the human body. Nowadays, a very limited set of carbon fragmentation cross sections has been measured and in particular, to our knowledge, no double differential fragmentation cross sections at intermediate energies are available in literature. We have measured the double differential cross sections and the angular distributions of the secondary fragments produced in the 12C fragmentation at 62 AMeV on a thin carbon target. The experimental data have been also used to benchmark the prediction capability of the Geant4 Monte Carlo code at intermediate energies, where it was never tested before.