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Updated: Mar 22, 2026

Coulomb Explosion Imaging as a Tool to Distinguish Between Stereoisomers
Published on: August 18, 2017
Distributions of deposited energy and ionization clusters around ion tracks studied with Geant4 toolkit
Lucas Burigo1,2, Igor Pshenichnov1,3, Igor Mishustin1,4
1Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS), Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, 60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Abstract:
The Geant4-based Monte Carlo model for Heavy-Ion Therapy (MCHIT) was extended to study the patterns of energy deposition at sub-micrometer distance from individual ion tracks. Dose distributions for low-energy (1)H, (4)He, (12)C and (16)O ions measured in several experiments are well described by the model in a broad range of radial distances, from 0.5 to 3000 nm. Despite the fact that such distributions are characterized by long tails, a dominant fraction of deposited energy (∼80%) is confined within a radius of about 10 nm. The probability distributions of clustered ionization events in nanoscale volumes of water traversed by (1)H, (2)H, (4)He, (6)Li, (7)Li, and (12)C ions are also calculated. A good agreement of calculated ionization cluster-size distributions with the corresponding experimental data suggests that the extended MCHIT can be used to characterize stochastic processes of energy deposition to sensitive cellular structures.
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