Single and multiple cross sections for ionizing processes of biological molecules by protons and α-particle impact: a classical Monte Carlo approach

Abstract

A classical trajectory model has been used to predict total cross sections of single and double ionizing processes (including capture processes) for several ion-biological molecule collisional systems in the intermediate and high energy range. In this work, the systems studied are water, adenine or cytosine targets ionized by protons and α-particles with kinetic energies ranging from 25 keV amu−1 to 3000 keV amu−1. In our approach, we have combined several features of two classical methods namely the classical trajectory Monte Carlo (CTMC) and the classical over-barrier (COB) models. For the water target, our results are compared, for high kinetic energies of incident particles, to the available experimental and theoretical results, and reasonable agreement are generally observed especially for the single ionization (liberated electron moves freely after the collision) and the single capture (liberated electron captured by the projectile), both processes representing ionizing processes. Considering the double ionizing processes which have been largely less studied, the unique comparison concerns the double capture process for α+H2O collision for which we reproduce the experiment reasonably well. Finally, we present total cross sections of single and double ionizing processes for biological targets such as adenine and cytosine where no experimental results exist till now.