The First Born Approximation for Ionization and Charge Transfer in Energetic Collisions of Multiply Charged Ions with Water

Abstract

With the more and more regular use of ionizing radiations in medicine and more particularly in hadrontherapy, it is today necessary to describe—with the highest degree of accuracy—the biological consequences of irradiations. To model the track-structure of charged particles in biological matter and then to quantify the full spectra of radio-induced cellular damages, Monte Carlo simulations are the preferential methods. The latter consist in modelling the history of the ionizing particles by means of a large set of input data, namely, the differential and total interaction cross sections in order to finely describe the complete kinematics of the ion-induced collisions. In these conditions, we clearly understand the necessity for the radiobiologists and the radiotherapists to access to accurate cross sections—in particular for collisions with water target—the latter being commonly used as surrogate of the cellular medium. We here report a review of the existing 1st Born predictions for describing the ionization and the charge transfer processes in the high-impact energy-regime particularly investigated in hadrontherapy.