Comparisons of hadrontherapy-relevant data to nuclear interaction codes in the Geant4 toolkit
Résumé
Comparisons between experimental data, INCL and other nuclear models available in the Geant4 toolkit are presented. The data used for the comparisons come from a fragmentation experiment realised at GANIL facility. The main purpose of this experiment was to measure production rates and angular distributions of emitted particles from the collision of a 95.A MeV 12C beam and thick PMMA (plastic) targets. The latest version of the Intra Nuclear Cascade of Liege code extended to nucleus-nucleus collisions for ion beam therapy application will be described. This code as well as JQMD and the Geant4 binary cascade has been compared with these hadrontherapy-oriented experimental data. The results from the comparisons exhibit an overall qualitative agreement between the models and the experimental data. However, at a quantitative level, it has been shown that none of this three models manage to reproduce precisely all the data. The nucleus-nucleus extension of INCL, which is not predictive enough for ion beam therapy application yet, has nevertheless proven to be competitive with other nuclear collisions codes.