The FLUKA Monte Carlo code is used extensively at CERN for all beam-machine interactions, radioprotection calculations and facility design of forthcoming projects. Such needs require the code to be consistently reliable over the entire energy range (from MeV to TeV) for all projectiles (full suite of elementary particles and heavy ions). Outside CERN, among various applications worldwide, FLUKA serves as a core tool for the HIT and CNAO hadron-therapy facilities in Europe. Therefore, medical applications further impose stringent requirements in terms of reliability and predictive power, which demands constant refinement of sophisticated nuclear models and continuous code improvement. Some of the latest developments implemented in FLUKA are presented in this paper, with particular emphasis on issues and concerns pertaining to CERN and medical applications. I.Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Nuclear Data Sheets 120 (2014) 211-214 0090-3752/

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We revisit the bottomonium spectrum motivated by the recently exciting experimental progress in the observation of new bottomonium states, both conventional and unconventional. Our framework is a nonrelativistic constituent quark model which has been applied to a wide range of hadronic observables from the light to the heavy quark sector and thus the model parameters are completely constrained. Beyond the spectrum, we provide a large number of electromagnetic, strong and hadronic decays in order to discuss the quark content of the bottomonium states and give more insights about the better way to determine their properties experimentally.Comment: 23 pages, 17 tables, 1 figur

Monte Carlo (MC) codes are increasingly spreading in the hadrontherapy community due to their detailed description of radiation transport and interaction with matter. The suitability of a MC code for application to hadrontherapy demands accurate and reliable physical models capable of handling all components of the expected radiation field. This becomes extremely important for correctly performing not only physical but also biologically based dose calculations, especially in cases where ions heavier than protons are involved. In addition, accurate prediction of emerging secondary radiation is of utmost importance in innovative areas of research aiming at in vivo treatment verification. This contribution will address the recent developments of the FLUKA MC code and its practical applications in this field. Refinements of the FLUKA nuclear models in the therapeutic energy interval lead to an improved description of the mixed radiation field as shown in the presented benchmarks against experimental data with both 4He and 12C ion beams. Accurate description of ionization energy losses and of particle scattering and interactions lead to the excellent agreement of calculated depth–dose profiles with those measured at leading European hadron therapy centers, both with proton and ion beams. In order to support the application of FLUKA in hospital-based environments, Flair, the FLUKA graphical interface, has been enhanced with the capability of translating CT DICOM images into voxel-based computational phantoms in a fast and well-structured way. The interface is capable of importing also radiotherapy treatment data described in DICOM RT standard. In addition, the interface is equipped with an intuitive PET scanner geometry generator and automatic recording of coincidence events. Clinically, similar cases will be presented both in terms of absorbed dose and biological dose calculations describing the various available features.

We have performed a coupled channel calculation of the 1 ++ cc sector including qq and DD * molecular configurations. The calculation was done within a constituent quark model which successfully describes the meson spectrum, in particular the cc 1 −− sector. Two and four quark configurations are coupled using the 3 P 0 model.The elusive X(3872) meson appears as a new state with a high probability for the DD * molecular component. When the mass difference between neutral and charged states is included a large D 0 D * 0 component is found which dominates for large distances and breaks isospin symmetry in the physical state. The original cc(2 3 P 1 ) state acquires a sizable DD * component and can be identified with the X(3940). We study the B → Kπ + π − J/ψ and B → KD 0 D * 0 decays finding a good agreement with Belle and BaBar experimental data.