Nuclear fragmentation measurements are necessary when using heavy-ion beams in hadrontherapy to predict the effects of the ion nuclear interactions within the human body. Moreover, they are also fundamental to validate and improve the Monte Carlo codes for their use in planning tumor treatments. Nowadays, a very limited set of carbon fragmentation cross sections are being measured, and in particular, to our knowledge, no double-differential fragmentation cross sections at intermediate energies are available in the literature. In this work, we have measured the double-differential cross sections and the angular distributions of the secondary fragments produced in the 12 C fragmentation at 62 A MeV on a thin carbon target.

Hadrontherapy is a C++ , free and open source application developed using the Geant4 Monte Carlo libraries. The basic version of Hadrontherapy is contained in the official Geant4 distribution (www.cern.ch/Geant4/download), inside the category of the advanced examples. This version permits the simulation of a typical proton/ion transport beam line and the calculation of dose and fluence distributions inside a test phantom.A more complete version of the program is separately maintained and released by the authors and it offers a wider set of tools useful for Users interested in proton/ion-therapy studies. It gives the possibility to retrieve ion stopping powers in arbitrary geometrical configuration, to calculate 3D distributions of fluences, dose deposited and LET of primary and of the generated secondary beams, to simulate typical nuclear physics experiments, to interactively switch between different implemented geometries, etc.In this work the main characteristics of the actual full version of Hadrontherapy will be reported and results discussed and compared with the available experimental data.For more information the reader can refer to the Hadrontherapy website.

1 of 6) 1600732 technology of mechanically reconfigurable metasurfaces is generating significant outcomes, [6] there are many applications which would benefit from a tunable device without any moving part. Being permeability in ordinary materials essentially equal to that in vacuum, researchers have intensively looked for processes enabling to tune the permittivity of some of the components which constitute the metasurface. A number of mechanisms and materials have been explored, spanning from free charge in ordinary semiconductors [7,8] and in graphene [9] up to phase-change materials, [10] materials based on insulatorto-metal or phase transitions, [11,12] gas adsorption into metals, [13] and liquid crystals. [14] An intrinsically different mechanism for tuning the permittivity of a material is electrochromism. In essence, electrochromism consists of a modification of the optical properties of the material occurring when it undergoes an electrochemical reaction. While being well known since many decades, its application to photonic devices is not yet fully explored. Most of the research developed to date is indeed based on conducting polymers; [15][16][17][18][19][20] however, electrochromism occurs also in transition metal oxides, which, compared to polymers, are in general more stable with respect to optical excitation.Among transition metal oxides, vanadium pentoxide (V 2 O 5 ) has the remarkable property to withstand the intercalation of huge amounts of lithium ions in its lattice [21][22][23] undergoing an intense investigation from the rechargeable battery community. Concurrently with lithium intercalation, the nearinfrared optical properties of V 2 O 5 are strongly modified, thus enabling the development of compact reconfigurable photo nic devices operating at telecommunication wavelengths. As a prototypical device we developed a metasurface comprising an array of aluminum nanoantennas directly placed on top of a V 2 O 5 layer (Figure 1a,b). The full layer stack (see the Methods section within the Supporting Information for details about the fabrication) also includes a platinum back plane, which has the main function of collecting/ injecting the balancing charge carried by electrons during the electrochemical intercalation process. This process took place in an electrochemical cell, following the procedure detailed in the Supporting Information. As an effect of intercalating a molar concentration x of Li ions, the V 2 O 5 material (which hence becomes Li x V 2 O 5 ) changes its permittivity according to Figure 1c: the major effect is observed on the imaginary part ε″, with a broad peak extending across the whole near-infrared spectral region, and values exceeding unity. This change of the complex permittivity is related to the mechanism of small polaron hopping, that is to the transfer of conduction electrons bound to the lattice ions to the neighboring orbitals (see the Supporting Information). It should be noticed that In the latest years the optical engineer's toolbox has welcomed a new concept, the m...

The Muon Portal is a recently born project that plans to build a large area muon detector for a noninvasive inspection of shipping containers in the ports, searching for the presence of potential fissile (U, Pu) threats. The technique employed by the project is the well-known muon tomography, based on cosmic muon scattering from high-Z materials. The design and operational parameters of the muon portal under construction will be described in this paper, together with preliminary simulation and test results.

A design for a new equipment for non intrusive inspection of containers in ports is described. The project involves the construction of a ∼125 m 3 cosmic muon-tracking detector, to measure the deflection of cosmic muons when traversing high-Z materials. The apparatus consists of four X-Y charged particle detector planes, two placed below and two above the container to be inspected. The detection planes are segmented into 300 cm long, 1 cm 2 square plastic scintillating strips with embedded WLS fibers that transport the scintillation light to photo-sensors (SiPMs) at one end of the fiber. Detailed GEANT4 simulations have demonstrated the possibility of reconstructing a 3D image of the container volume in a reasonable amount of time, compatible with the requirements of a fast inspection technique.