Ionization and electron capture total cross sections for biological molecules impacted by ions

M. A. QUINTO; FOJÓN, OMAR A.; PHILIPPE F. WECK; R. D. RIVAROLA; J.M. MONTI; C. CHAMPION

Foz de Iguazu

Conferencia; 9th International Symposium on BioPIXE (BioPIXE 2018); 2018

Ionization and electron capture from atoms and molecules impacted by charged particle impactare of relevance in many areas of physics including astrophysics, plasma physics and radio-biology with a particular emphasis in medical physics. Indeed, at medium and high impactenergies, the latter are the main mechanisms leading to energy loss in the living matter. In thiscontext, modeling the radiobiological damages induced by charged particles crossing the livingmatter requires a precise knowledge of the full radiation history. Thus, various electronic reactionsmust properly be characterized in order to access to the finest description of the cell-damagingprocesses and the dose deposition. In this respect, Monte-Carlo (MC) track structure codes areamong the best-suited tools for providing an accurate description of the radio-induced energeticpattern at the nanometer scale. However, to achieve this goal, the MC codes must be suppliedwith a full set of cross sections data for all the involved electronic reactions. Besides, asdemonstrated in our previous work, the biological tissue has to be properly modeled by taking inparticular a realistic DNA composition instead of using water as surrogate of living matter [1].We aim here to describe the ionization and the electron capture processes for water and DNAnucleobases impacted by light ions, at intermediate and high energies, within the ContinuumDistorted Wave-Eikonal Initial State (CDW-EIS) approximation. In the current work, we willpresent preliminary results in terms of total cross sections as well as energy transfers for bothionization and electron capture induced by proton, alpha-particles and carbon ions [2].