Determination of Energy Deposited in Nanometre Sites from Ionisation Data

Abstract

Abstract The paper is devoted to the ionisation method for determination of various characteristics of energy deposited in small sensitive sites of irradiated objects by ionising radiation. It is shown that traditional ionisation methods supposing the direct proportionality between energy deposited in a site and the number of ionisations in it fails to determine fluctuation characteristics in nanometre sized sites. The exact formulae connecting fluctuation characteristics of deposited energy and those of the number of ionisations, are proposed. The new radiation parameters are defined, in particular, fluctuation generalisations of W value; the most important of them are calculated for radiations of different quality using Monte Carlo techniques. The way to correct theoretical and experimental results obtained by a traditional ionisation method is proposed.