Speaker
Description
In Particle Therapy, a highly precise dose distribution in treatment planning minimizes the risk of damaging healthy tissues. Both beam and target can undergo nuclear fragmentation, causing an undesired dose release, but the cross-sections of such processes are not well known, and very limited data are available on differential cross-sections with respect to energy and emission angle.
The FOOT experiment aims at addressing this issue through two alternative configurations, identifying the charge (Z) and mass (A) of secondary particles produced by proton, 4-He, 12-C, and 16-O beams in hadrontherapy treatments with a precision of 2–3% and 5% respectively.
Therefore, the FOOT calorimeter is required to achieve a resolution better than 2% on the fragments kinetic energy. This study evaluates the detector performance and its impact on the identification of mass isotopes produced by nuclear fragmentation. With reference to the 2024 data-taking campaign at CNAO (Pavia), the energy calibration process of the calorimeter is illustrated, along with its technical conditions and limitations. In the second part of the presentation, the first experimental results are shown, concerning the mass identification of fragments produced by 12-C at 200 MeV/u on a 5-mm thick graphite target. These results are obtained by combining measurements from the Calorimeter and other detectors of the FOOT experimental setup: in particular, the TOF-Wall (TW), which measures the atomic number (Z) of fragments and, in combination with the Start Counter (SC), their Time-Of-Flight.
Isotopes of H, He, Li, Be, B, and C were successfully identified, although further improvements are expected due to the preliminary nature of the analysis. However, most of the detector response effects, particularly those related to quenching phenomena, have been successfully modeled for different ion species.
Details
Benedetto Spadavecchia, PhD Fellow at University of Turin, Italy.
| Internet talk | Maybe |
|---|---|
| Is this an abstract from experimental collaboration? | Yes |
| Name of experiment and experimental site | FOOT |
| Is the speaker for that presentation defined? | Yes |