Benchmarking GEANT4 nuclear models for hadron therapy with 95 MeV/nucleon carbon ions

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the accuracy of different nuclear reaction models in GEANT4 for simulating carbon ion interactions relevant to hadron therapy, using new experimental data at 95 MeV/nucleon.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of GEANT4 nuclear models against recent experimental data at intermediate energies for hadron therapy simulations.

Findings

G4BinaryLightIonReaction shows strengths in certain energy ranges.

G4QMDReaction has limitations in fragment production accuracy.

INCL++ performs well in modeling secondary particle emissions.

Abstract

In carbon-therapy, the interaction of the incoming beam with human tissues may lead to the production of a large amount of nuclear fragments and secondary light particles. An accurate estimation of the biological dose deposited into the tumor and the surrounding healthy tissues thus requires sophisticated simulation tools based on nuclear reaction models. The validity of such models requires intensive comparisons with as many sets of experimental data as possible. Up to now, a rather limited set of double di erential carbon fragmentation cross sections have been measured in the energy range used in hadrontherapy (up to 400 MeV/A). However, new data have been recently obtained at intermediate energy (95 MeV/A). The aim of this work is to compare the reaction models embedded in the GEANT4 Monte Carlo toolkit with these new data. The strengths and weaknesses of each tested model, i.e. G4BinaryLightIonReaction, G4QMDReaction and INCL++, coupled to two di fferent de-excitation models, i.e. the generalized evaporation model and the Fermi break-up are discussed.