Recent developments and benchmarking of the PHITS code

Journal article, 2007

Many new options have recently been included in PHITS, e.g., to calculate LET distributions of particles in matter or energy-deposition distributions event by event and correlations between energy depositions in different regions. This makes it possible to calculate the effects of particle radiation on biological and non-biological materials, e.g., risk for single event upsets in electronic devices. As a part of an extensive ongoing benchmarking of PHITS, we have compared calculated partial projectile fragmentation cross sections with accelerator-based measurements from the reactions of 200-1000 MeV/n He-4, C-12, N-14, O-16, Ne-20, Si-28, Ar-40, and Fe-56 on polyethylene, carbon, aluminum, copper, tin and lead, with different thicknesses, using different total reaction cross section models in PHITS. We have compared simulated and measured Bragg and attenuation curves of 200 MeV/n C-12 in water, and neutron energy spectra, at different angles, from 100 to 400 MeV/n C-12 stopped in water. Bragg curves for 110, 140, 170, 190 and 225 MeV/n He-3 in water have been studied, as well as gamma-ray dose decay curves of activated Cu target bombarded by 400 and 800 MeV/n Ar-40. When using the default total reaction cross section model developed by Tripathi et al. (1996,1997 and 1999) [Tripathi, R.K., Cucinotta, F.A., Wilson, J.W. Accurate universal parameterization of absorption cross sections, Nucl. Instr. Methods B117, 347, 1996; Tripathi, R.K., Wilson, J.W., Cucinotta, F.A. Accurate universal parameterization of absorption cross sections II - neutron absorption cross sections. Nucl. Instr. Methods B129, 11, 1997; Tripathi, R.K., Cucinotta, F.A., Wilson, J.W. Accurate universal parameterization of absorption cross sections III - light systems. Nucl. Instr. Methods B155, 349, 1999.] the partial fragmentation cross sections appear to be systematically slightly underestimated by a factor which is independent on the fragment species within the same data set, and so do the simulated neutron energy spectra from selected heavy ion reactions; especially in the forward direction. The simulated attenuation and Bragg curves, however, show good agreement with measured ones. These observations stimulate further benchmarking to confirm the accuracy of the code and gives directions on possible improvements to be applied to the code in the near future. (C) 2007 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of COSPAR.