Secondary particle predictions in quasifree proton scattering reactions in the 100–250 MeV energy range

Abstract

Results for observables related to the secondary particle production process in proton-nucleus spallation reactions at low beam incident energy (100--250 MeV) are shown. The energy and angular distributions of the residual nucleus are determined in the context of our multicollisional Monte Carlo intranuclear cascade model. The mechanism of proton-nucleus reactions is conventionally described as a sequence of two stages: the rapid intranuclear cascade phase and the slow particle evaporation step. In this work we focus on the rapid phase considering the nucleon effective mass as an effect of the many-body nuclear interactions and the intranuclear mean field. This procedure represents a more realistic scenario to obtain the particles' multiplicity generated in spallation reactions with light-mass target nuclei in a low-energy range. We focused our attention on target nuclei of macro elements, such as carbon, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur, sodium, potassium, chlorine, and calcium, and trace elements such as iron, copper, zinc, bromine and selenium, which are the most frequent compounds of the organic material. The choice of these target nuclei is due to our expectancy that our results can work as a preliminary insight for further theoretical approaches, specially taking into account nuclear effects due to the interaction of the particles of the beam with the organic tissue.