The FOOT FragmentatiOn Of Target Experiment

In proton-therapy clinical practice a constant RBE equal to 1.1 is adopted, regardless of the demonstrated RBE variations, which depends on physical and biological parameters. Among other mechanisms, nuclear interactions might influence the proton-RBE due to secondary heavier particles produced by target fragmentation that can significantly contribute to the total dose: an unwanted and undetermined increase of normal tissues complications probability may occur. The FOOT experiment is designed to study these processes. Target (16O,12C) fragmentation induced by 150−250MeV proton beam will be studied via inverse kinematic approach, where 16O and 12C therapeutic beams, with the same kinetic energy per nucleon of the proton, collide on graphite and hydrocarbons target to provide the cross section on Hydrogen (to explore also the projectile fragmentation). The detector design, the performances and expected resolution results obtained form Monte Carlo study, based on the FLUKA code will be presented.