The FOOT experiment: the associated physics and its acquisition system

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) about 8.8 million of deaths in 2015 were caused by cancer. The treatments for cancer are several: beyond the traditional surgery, chemiotherapy and radiotherapy, also hadrontherapy is developing. The hadrontherapy cures the cancer with ion or proton beams. Every tumor type requires a specific treatment plan called Treatment Planning System (TPS), that it is not complete for hadrontherapy because there is the need of knowing the dose deposition both due to the beam particle ionization and the fragmentation. In this context, the FOOT experiment aims at collecting measurements and data about target or projectile fragmentation cross sections since currently the experimental panorama is rather scarse on the measurements of fragments produced in the interaction of protons or ions with tissue nuclei at the hadrontherapy energies (about 250 MeV for protons and 350 MeV/n for carbon ions). At the moment, the FOOT experiment is at its start and so are the detectors setup and the acquisition system projects. On these bases, this thesis work reports the scientific panorama, highlighting the need of covering the measurement lacks. Moreover, a preliminary example of DAQ system is described with a connected online monitoring system to test the DAQ boards.