Spectra of secondary electrons generated in water by energetic ions

Abstract

The energy distributions of secondary electrons produced by energetic carbon ions (in the energy range used, e.g., in hadron therapy), incident on liquid water, are discussed. For low-energy ions, a new parameterization of the singly-differential ionization cross sections is introduced, based on tuning the position of the Bragg peak. The resulting parameterization allows a fast calculation of the energy spectra of secondary electrons at different depths along the ion's trajectory, especially near the Bragg peak. At the same time, this parameterization provides penetration depths for a broad range of initial-ion energies within the therapeutically-accepted error. For high-energy ions, the energy distribution is obtained with a use of the dielectric response function approach. Different models are compared and discussed.

18 pages, 5 figures. submitted to Phys.Rev.E

References in corpus (3)

• Physics of ion beam cancer therapy: a multi-scale approach
• Ion-induced electron production in tissue-like media and DNA damage mechanisms
• Comparative study of depth-dose distributions for beams of light and heavy nuclei in tissue-like media

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