Fragmentation of the positron-emitting nucleus 11C on a carbon target at 248 MeV/nucleon

Radioactive ions with positron-emitting such as 11C have been proposed to be used in heavy ion therapy due to their advantageous characteristics in verifying the ion range. However, the interaction between the incident beam and the patient’s body can induce the attenuation of the beam and the generation of the fragmentation products. The study of the impact of these processes suffers from the limited precision of experimental data and nuclear models. This paper presents a measurement of the total and partial charge-changing cross sections of 11C on a carbon target at a beam energy of approximately 250 MeV/nucleon. The measured cross sections are compared with the calculations based on EPAX3, PHITS-JQMD, PHITS-JQMD2.0, INCL++, and Bradt-Peters formula. Most model calculations can provide a rough description of the measured total charge-changing cross section, but some discrepancies between model calculations and the measured partial charge-changing cross section were also observed.