Geant4 physics processes for microdosimetry simulation: Very low energy electromagnetic models for protons and heavy ions in silicon

The Geant4-DNA extension of the Geant4 Monte Carlo simulation toolkit aims at modeling early biological damages induced by ionizing radiation at the DNA scale, and it can now track particles down to very low energies in liquid water. New models, called "MuElec", have been implemented for microelectronic applications following the same initial theory, to track low energy electrons in silicon. This paper presents the extension of these MuElec models to incident protons and heavy ions in silicon. First, the theory of the model is presented. The resulting cross sections and stopping powers are compared with data from the literature. The model is then implemented in Geant4 and used to simulate proton tracks. Various physical quantities are extracted from the simulation, and compared with data from the literature and with results from simulation using other Geant4 models. It is shown that the generation of low-energy electrons results in more physically meaningful low-energy secondary electron tracks, which significantly modifies the proton and ion track core on the nanometer scale. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.