Geant4 simulation for hadronic interactions in space radiation environment

The space radiation environment is a significant challenge to future space travel. Future space missions will rely more on accurate simulations of radiation transport in space through spacecraft to predict astronaut dose and energy deposition within spacecraft electronics. The existing radiation models are not been able to explain the experimental data for an intense space radiation environment, which mainly consists of high energy particles, for example hadrons and heavy ions originating from Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCR) and Solar Particle Events (SPE's). Therefore there is an urgent need to develop a precise radiation model for deep space missions through fast simulations. In this work, Geant4 (Geometry and Tracking Software) Monte Carlo simulation tool is used to simulate and model the hadronic interactions of high energy particles (0.1~10 GeV/nucleon) in the GCR spectrum. We have incorporated the physics model FTFP_BERT_HP to understand the interaction of proton and heavy ions with water phantom for two different detector shapes: a) Slab b) Sphere. Energy loss by proton and heavy ions is measured and compared for both shapes for beam kinetic energy in the range of eV to the order of TeV. This study is useful to determine radiation dose in the space radiation environment. The hadronic interaction in the Space radiation environment is modelled using the FTFP_BERT_HP model in Geant4. The detector geometries: slab and sphere are simulated and energy loss is measured by proton and heavy ions. Further, the effect of shapes and charge on the energy loss spectrum are studied. This study is useful to measure the radiation dose in future space missions