New Capabilities of the FLUKA Multi-Purpose Code
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Frontiers
Materia
FLUKA Monte Carlo transport Beam-matter interaction High energy physics Crystal channeling Medical physics Single event effects (SEE)
Date
2022-01-27Referencia bibliográfica
Ahdida C... [et al.]. (2022) New Capabilities of the FLUKA Multi- Purpose Code. Front. Phys. 9:788253. doi: [10.3389/fphy.2021.788253]
Résumé
FLUKA is a general purpose Monte Carlo code able to describe the transport and
interaction of any particle and nucleus type in complex geometries over an energy
range extending from thermal neutrons to ultrarelativistic hadron collisions. It has many
different applications in accelerator design, detector studies, dosimetry, radiation
protection, medical physics, and space research. In 2019, CERN and INFN, as FLUKA
copyright holders, together decided to end their formal collaboration framework, allowing
them henceforth to pursue different pathways aimed at meeting the evolving requirements
of the FLUKA user community, and at ensuring the long term sustainability of the code. To
this end, CERN set up the FLUKA.CERN Collaboration1. This paper illustrates the physics
processes that have been newly released or are currently implemented in the code
distributed by the FLUKA.CERN Collaboration2 under new licensing conditions that are
meant to further facilitate access to the code, as well as intercomparisons. The description
of coherent effects experienced by high energy hadron beams in crystal devices, relevant
to promising beam manipulation techniques, and the charged particle tracking in vacuum
regions subject to an electric field, overcoming a former lack, have already been made
available to the users. Other features, namely the different kinds of low energy deuteron
interactions as well as the synchrotron radiation emission in the course of charged particle
transport in vacuum regions subject to magnetic fields, are currently undergoing
systematic testing and benchmarking prior to release. FLUKA is widely used to
evaluate radiobiological effects, with the powerful support of the Flair graphical
interface, whose new generation (Available at http://flair.cern) offers now additional
capabilities, e.g., advanced 3D visualization with photorealistic rendering and support for industry-standard volume visualization of medical phantoms. FLUKA has also been
playing an extensive role in the characterization of radiation environments in which
electronics operate. In parallel, it has been used to evaluate the response of
electronics to a variety of conditions not included in radiation testing guidelines and
standards for space and accelerators, and not accessible through conventional ground
level testing. Instructive results have been obtained from Single Event Effects (SEE)
simulations and benchmarks, when possible, for various radiation types and energies.
The code has reached a high level of maturity, from which the FLUKA.CERN Collaboration
is planning a substantial evolution of its present architecture. Moving towards a modern
programming language allows to overcome fundamental constraints that limited
development options. Our long term goal, in addition to improving and extending its
physics performances with even more rigorous scientific oversight, is to modernize its
structure to integrate independent contributions more easily and to formalize quality
assurance through state-of-the-art software deployment techniques. This includes a
continuous integration pipeline to automatically validate the codebase as well as
automatic processing and analysis of a tailored physics-case test suite. With regard to
the aforementioned objectives, several paths are currently envisaged, like finding synergies
with Geant4, both at the core structure and interface level, this way offering the user the
possibility to run with the same input different Monte Carlo codes and crosscheck the
results.