Ion-beam cancer therapy: news about a multiscale approach to radiation damage

We report the present stage of development of our multiscale approach to the physics related to radiation damage caused by irradiation of a tissue with energetic ions. This approach is designed to quantify the most important physical, chemical, and biological phenomena taking place during and following such an irradiation in order to understand the scenario of the events leading to cell death and provide a better means for clinically necessary calculations with an adequate accuracy. On this stage, we overview the latest progress in calculating energy spectra of secondary electrons in liquid water and the results of an application of the inelastic thermal spike model to liquid water in order to calculate the heat transfer in the vicinity of the incident-ion track. The dependence of energy distributions of secondary electrons, resulting from ionization of the liquid water, on the energy of primary ions is studied in two regimes. For slow ions, a new parameterization of energy spectra in liquid water is suggested. For fast ions, different dispersion schemes on the basis of a dielectric response function approach are used and compared. Thermal spike calculations indicate a very large temperature increase in the vicinity of ion tracks near the Bragg peak during the time interval from 10(-15) to 10(-9)s after the ion's passage. An increase of pressure, as large as tens of MPa, can also be induced during that time. These effects suggest a possibility of thermo-mechanical pathways to disruption of irradiated DNA. A combination of a temperature spike and electron/hole interactions may be a dominant pathway of DNA damage.