Astroparticle Techniques: Simulating Cosmic Rays induced Background Radiation on Aircrafts
H. Asorey, L. A. Núñez, C. Y. Pérez Arias, S. Pinilla, F. Quiñonez, M. Suárez-Durán
TTo appear in “XV Latin American Regional IAU Meeting LARIM (2016)”
RevMexAA(SC)
ASTROPARTICLE TECHNIQUES: SIMULATING COSMIC RAYS INDUCEDBACKGROUND RADIATION ON AIRCRAFTS
H. Asorey , L. A. N´u˜nez , C. Y. P´erez-Arias , S. Pinilla , F. Qui˜nonez and M. S´uarez-Dur´an . Incident cosmic ray fluxes over flying aircraftsare compared with those in Bucaramanga,Colombia and very significant differences areobserved for proton and neutron fluxes. Wealso obtained that major contributions in thedeposited energy by Cherenkov photons onblood plasma is in the UV-C band.
Cosmic Rays (particles and nuclei with energiesfrom 10 eV to 10 eV) enter into the atmospheregenerating a cascade of particles impinging on air-crafts flying between 10 km to 12 km. It has beenfound that at these altitude airplanes are exposed tocosmic ray radiation levels up to two order of mag-nitude higher than at sea level (Pinilla et al. 2015).Integrated particle flux and its modulation arecarefully calculated and corrected by considering lo-cal atmospheric profiles and dynamic geomagneticconditions at a constant altitude of 11 km (Asoreyet al. 2015). Subsequently, these results arepiped into a GEANT4/GATE simulation plat-form (OpenGate Collaboration 2011) to model theinteraction of high energy particles with a sphericalblood plasma phantom of 0 . .Hight energy secondary particle flux at flightlevel directly (for charged particles) and indirectly(trough, e.g., pair creation) generate Cherenkov pho-tons in the medium. The Cherenkov energy spec-tra and the corresponding deposited energy in bloodplasma are estimated for five flight trajectories:BOG-BUE, BUE-MAD, JNB-SYD, JFK-HND andSAO-JNB. These flights were selected due differentgeomagnetic features they cross, such as the Arcticoval or the South Atlantic Anomaly.Every 30 minutes the flux is calculated with thecorresponding local atmospheric profile and seculargeomagnetic conditions and this flux value is as-sumed constant during the next 30 minutes track.When compared with a reference point (Bucara-manga, Colombia, 965 m.a.s.l.), very significant dif-ferences on the relative flux (∆ N = ( N Route − Laboratorio Detecci´on de Part´ıculas y Radiaci´on, CentroAt´omico Bariloche & Instituto Balseiro, Bariloche, Argentina Escuela de F´ısica, Universidad Industrial de Santander,Bucaramanga, Colombia. Departamento de F´ısica, Universidad de Los Andes,M´erida, Venezuela
TABLE 1NUMBER OF SECONDARIES AT FLIGHTLEVEL RELATIVE TO BUCARAMANGA.
Fig. 1. Deposited energies in plasma by Cherenkovphotons in the standard ultraviolet (UV) bands: UVA(315 nm −
400 nm), UVB (280 nm −
315 nm) and UVC(100 nm −
280 nm). N BGA ) /N BGA ) for photons, protons and neutronsare observed (see Table 1). Our calculations showthat the major deposited energy contribution inblood comes from Cherenkov photons in the UV-C100 nm −
280 nm band. With these calculated valuesfor UV exposure, it seems that it is possible to in-duce some damage at cellular level (Prada-Medinaet al. 2016). REFERENCES
Asorey, H., Dasso, S., N´u˜nez, L., P´erez, Y., Sarmiento-Cano, C., & Su´arez-Dur´an, M. 2015, in 34th Interna-tional Cosmic Ray Conference, PoS(ICRC2015), 142OpenGate Collaboration 2011, Physics in Medicine andBiology, 56, 881Pinilla, S., Asorey, H., & N´u˜nez, L. 2015, Nuclear andParticle Physics Proceedings, 267-269, 418Prada-Medina, C.A., Aristizabal-Tessmer, E.T.,Quintero-Ruiz, N., Serment-Guerrero, J., & Fuentes,J.L. 2016, International Jour. of Radiation Biology, 1 a r X i v : . [ phy s i c s . s p ace - ph ] A p rr