New potentialities of the Li\`ege intranuclear cascade (INCL) model for reactions induced by nucleons and light charged particles

TL;DR

The paper introduces INCL4.6, an enhanced intranuclear cascade model for better simulation of nucleon and light charged particle reactions, including new features like cluster production, Coulomb deflection, and improved light-ion reaction treatment.

Contribution

The paper presents INCL4.6, a significantly improved version of the Liège intranuclear cascade model with new features for more accurate reaction simulations.

Findings

Good agreement with experimental data in 200 MeV-2 GeV range

Accurate total reaction cross sections below 200 MeV

Reasonable description of differential cross sections at low energies

Abstract

The new version (INCL4.6) of the Li`ege intranuclear cascade (INC) model for the description of spallation reactions is presented in detail. Compared to the standard version (INCL4.2), it incorporates several new features, the most important of which are: (i) the inclusion of cluster production through a dynamical phase space coalescence model, (ii) the Coulomb deflection for entering and outgoing charged particles, (iii) the improvement of the treatment of Pauli blocking and of soft collisions, (iv) the introduction of experimental threshold values for the emission of particles, (v) the improvement of pion dynamics, (vi) a detailed procedure for the treatment of light-cluster induced reactions taking care of the effects of binding energy of the nucleons inside the incident cluster and of the possible fusion reaction at low energy. Performances of the new model concerning nucleon-induced reactions are illustrated. Whenever necessary, the INCL4.6 model is coupled to the ABLA07 deexcitation model and the respective merits of the two models are then tentatively disentangled. Good agreement is generally obtained in the 200 MeV-2 GeV range. Below 200 MeV and down to a few tens of MeV, the total reaction cross section is well reproduced and differential cross sections are reasonably well described. The model is also tested for light-ion induced reactions at low energy, below 100 MeV incident energy per nucleon. Beyond presenting the update of the INCL4.2 model, attention has been paid to applications of the new model to three topics for which some particular aspects are discussed for the first time: production of clusters heavier than alpha particles, longitudinal residue recoil velocity and its fluctuations, total reaction cross section and the residue production cross sections for low energy incident light ions.