In this work, simulations of the clearance monitor HWM-1800 (Ludlum GmbH, Hamburg) with the Monte Carlo (MC) code FLUKA were performed and optimized. Nowadays, clearance monitors are being widely implemented for decommissioning activities in nuclear reactors and particle accelerator facilities. For every situation, a different calibration is typically needed, depending on the material composition of the samples to be released, their volume and the expected radionuclides.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe mean excitation energy 〈I〉 is a fundamental quantity in radiation physics, concerning energy deposition in matter and absorbed dose analytical estimations for charged particles. The stopping of charged particles in different materials strongly depends on this parameter among others. This work intends to contribute with insights for some issues, usually treated not in detail in the theory of stopping power, as the analytic and theoretic assessment of 〈I〉-value for different relevant materials.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDifferent kinds of nanoparticles have been widely studied for biomedical purposes, including applications like dose enhancement in radiotherapy treatments and contrast agent in radiological studies. Recent work suggests that gold nanoparticles can be used as contrast agents in K-edge imaging and X-ray Fluorescence Computed Tomography, mainly due to their high K-edge energy value and good biocompatibility. However, the gold X-ray fluorescence (XRF) signal obtained in these procedures is relatively week when compared with Compton or bremsstrahlung radiation emitted in the surrounding tissues, mainly because it is not possible to achieve large gold nanoparticles concentrations within biological tissues added to the XRF is attenuated by other tissues when leaving the patient body.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn recent years, the nuclear reaction known as proton-boron fusion has been thoroughly investigated, because it has been proposed as a suitable agent capable of significant improvements in cancer therapy with protons. Thereby, precise knowledge about physical properties involved represents the main strategy to assess actual potential of the proposed treatment method based on proton-boron fusion. In this work, the effective reaction cross section is studied from a theoretical point of view, and a direct application to the inelastic collisions distribution provided by Monte Carlo simulations is reported, weighting the importance of the reaction in the energy deposition process, and hence providing useful insight in the localized nature of the technique.
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