Nuclear fragmentation reactions in extended media studied with Geant4 toolkit

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the Fermi break-up and statistical multifragmentation models within Geant4 for simulating nuclear fragmentation, with implications for medical and space radiation shielding.

Contribution

It assesses the accuracy and performance of nuclear fragmentation models in Geant4 for extended media, relevant to medical and space applications.

Findings

Models accurately predict secondary fragment yields

Impact on depth-dose profiles in extended media

Implications for ion-beam therapy and cosmic radiation shielding

Abstract

It is well known from numerous experiments that nuclear multifragmentation is a dominating mechanism for production of intermediate-mass fragments in nucleus-nucleus collisions at energies above 100 A MeV. In this paper we investigate the validity and performance of the Fermi break-up model and the statistical multifragmentation model implemented as parts of the Geant4 toolkit. We study the impact of violent nuclear disintegration reactions on the depth-dose profiles and yields of secondary fragments for beams of light and medium-weight nuclei propagating in extended media. Implications for ion-beam cancer therapy and shielding from cosmic radiation are discussed.