Fragmentation cross sections at intermediate energies for hadrontherapy and space radiation protection

Abstract

Nuclear fragmentation studies, historically driven by the interest of the nuclear physicists, are nowadays the subject of great attention for the hadrontherapy and the space radiation protection communities. In both fields, fragmentation cross sections are needed to predict the effects of the ion nuclear interactions within the patient’s and the astronaut’s body. Indeed, the the Monte Carlo codes used in planning tumor treatments and space missions must be tuned and validated by experimental data. However, only a limited set of fragmentation cross sections are available in literature, especially at Fermi energies. Therefore we have studied the production of secondary fragments in the 12C+12C and 12C+ 197Au reactions at 62 AMeV. Some of the measured cross sections are presented in this work.