FOOT: an experiment to measure fragmentation cross sections for hadrontherapy - Monte Carlo data analysis and preliminary results from GSI and CNAO data taking

Hadrontherapy is a cancer treatment that exploits the irradiation with heavy charged particles. Its main advantage derives from the depth-dose profile of this particles, which release most of their energy in a narrow region inside the patient body. One of the major problem of hadrontherapy is the nuclear fragmentation, which is not a fully understood phenomenon. The main goal of the FOOT experiment is to study the fragmentation of heavy-ion beams onto H-enriched targets in order to identify the produced fragments and to measure the differential cross sections of such processes of relevant interest for hadrontherapy. The use of the inverse kinematic approach should provide important information to better understand the effect of the proton/hadron therapy on patient tissues. The FOOT detector has been designed to perform high-precision identification of the produced fragments by measuring their trajectory, velocity, momentum and energy. Monte Carlo simulations and test beams are ongoing in order to verify the detector capability. In this thesis, an analysis of Monte Carlo data has been carried out in order to show the FOOT capability in identifying fragments and reconstructing the fragmentation cross sections. The data taking performed at the GSI has been also studied; the preliminary results confirm, in agreement with Monte Carlo data, an excellent precision in charge identification.