Heavy Ion Interactions from Coulomb Barrier to Few GeV/n: Boltzmann Master Equation Theory and FLUKA Code Performances

The importance of an accurate prediction of all what happens when a nuclear interaction takes place, i.e. of the cross sections of the reactions which may occur and of the spectra of particles, γ rays and heavy residues which may be produced, cannot be underestimated from the point of view of both basic knowledge and the possible use of nuclear physics in interdisciplinary fields and applications useful to mankind such as medical diagnostics and therapy, dosimetry, environmental control, space physics, and industrial research. Satisfactory results were first obtained for nucleon induced reactions by MonteCarlo calculations and the subsequent pre-equilibrium theories [1] which provided the unification of seemingly different nuclear reaction theories. The extension of such results to heavy ion interactions is one of the goals of our collaboration, exploring different approaches. At incident energies up to about 50 MeV/n calculations considering both the mean field interaction between the two ions and the subsequent de-excitation via nucleon– nucleon collisions of the highly excited composite nucleus which may be created, are performed with the Boltzmann Master Equation (BME) theory [2, 3] and reproduce reliably a large set of data. At considerably higher energies various experiments are analysed using FLUKA (a transport and interaction MonteCarlo code capable of handling reactions induced by hadronic and electromagnetic particles ranging from thermal neutrons up to cosmic rays with several TeV incident energy [4, 5, 6]) coupled with a modified version of a Relativistic Quantum Molecular Dynamics (RQMD) code developed in Frankfurt [7, 8]. In this paper we show some recent results obtained for both energy ranges.