Eur. Phys. J. D (2017) 71: 130
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2017-70709-6

Regular Article

Monte Carlo simulation of proton track structure in biological matter^*

¹ Instituto de Física Rosario, CONICET – Universidad Nacional de Rosario, S 2000 EKF Rosario, Argentina
² Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM, USA
³ Université de Lorraine, CNRS, Institut de Chimie, Physique et Matériaux, 57 000 Metz, France
⁴ Université de Bordeaux, CNRS/IN2P3, Centre d’Etudes Nucléaires de Bordeaux Gradignan, CENBG, 33170 Gradignan, France

^a e-mail: champion@cenbg.in2p3.fr

Received: 12 November 2016
Received in final form: 9 February 2017
Published online: 25 May 2017

Abstract

Understanding the radiation-induced effects at the cellular and subcellular levels remains crucial for predicting the evolution of irradiated biological matter. In this context, Monte Carlo track-structure simulations have rapidly emerged among the most suitable and powerful tools. However, most existing Monte Carlo track-structure codes rely heavily on the use of semi-empirical cross sections as well as water as a surrogate for biological matter. In the current work, we report on the up-to-date version of our homemade Monte Carlo code TILDA-V – devoted to the modeling of the slowing-down of 10 keV–100 MeV protons in both water and DNA – where the main collisional processes are described by means of an extensive set of ab initio differential and total cross sections.