OMA Fellow contributes to XXXVI Biennial Meeting of the Spanish Royal Physics Society
OMA Fellow Anna Baratto Roldán presented her research at the 36th Biennial Meeting of the Spanish Royal Physics Society, held in Santiago de Compostela from 17th to 21st July 2017.
The Spanish Royal Physics Society (Real Sociedad Española de Física – RSEF) is a non-profit organization whose first objective is the promotion and development of physics in all its fields and applications, through the encouragement of scientific research and transmission of knowledge at all the educational levels. The RSEF, which is a reference institution for the Spanish physics researchers’ community, organizes a conference every two years, giving special attention to the work of young researchers, promoting their networking and ideas sharing.
During the session dedicated to nuclear physics applied to medicine, Anna gave a talk on “Dose average linear energy transfer calculation from microdosimetric quantities with the Geant4 toolkit: Application for proton therapy beams”.
This work is part of her OMA research project “Radiobiological Effectiveness of Protons”, which includes the development of a set-up for the irradiation of biological samples with low energy proton beams (<10MeV), to study the variation of proton Relative Biological Effectiveness (RBE) in the proximity of the Bragg peak. Another important part of the project involves the use of Monte Carlo simulations for proton RBE studies. In this context, the code presented during her talk proposes a method for the calculation of various microdosimetric quantities of clinical proton beams in water. These quantities will be used to characterize low energy proton beams, in order to obtain the physical magnitudes needed to apply theoretical RBE models.