• nuclear physics
• charged particle therapy
• radiotherapy
• trigger
• data acquisition system

In Charged Particle Therapy (CPT), proton or ion beams are used to treat deep-seated solid tumors. However, the nuclear interactions of the beam with the patient tissue can lead to fragmentation of projectiles and/or target nuclei that can release a non-negligible dose along all the beam path, or contribute to dose deposited beyond the Bragg peak. The study of the biological effects of these processes suffers from the limitation in the experimental nuclear cross section data available for the energy range of interest for CPT (hundreds of MeV/u). The FOOT experiment aims at experimentally measuring fragment production cross section in the context of radiation therapy and space radioprotection.

The main purposes of this work were to develop an ad-hoc trigger to select events in which a fragmentation occurred in the FOOT apparatus, test and validate the trigger threshold calibration procedure and study the fragmentation trigger efficiency. The data have been acquired during the data taking performed on 11/2021, at CNAO (Pavia), to which I directly participated. Moreover, analysis software to process the raw detector signals in order to perform the fragment reconstruction was developed. Using a 5 mm C-target, the trigger efficiency was found to be ≈ 100% for H, He, Li, Be and ≥ 99% for B fragments with a C-ion beam of various energies: 150, 200, 300, and 400 MeV/u.