Comments on ICRU report no. 49: stopping powers and ranges for protons and alpha particles

The International Commission on Radiation Units and Measurements (ICRU) published Report No. 49, Stopping Powers and Ranges for Protons and Alpha Particles, in 1993. Since the report shows only limited comparisons to experimental data, this Commentary discusses limits on the accuracy of its tables. Some of the stopping tabulations appear to have unusual variations for high energies (>1 MeV/nucleon) of the order of 2-4%, while the lower energies have possible errors of 10-20% for those targets which were not fitted with new data.