Speaker
Description
This contribution summarizes several physics improvements recently implemented in the FLUKA code, as distributed by the FLUKA.CERN Collaboration under new licensing conditions. This follows a new agreement between CERN and INFN (as FLUKA copyrights holders) to prepare the future of FLUKA, drawing on lessons learned and current standards in the organization of software collaborations. Its goal is to ensure FLUKA's long-term sustainability and capability to meet the evolving requirements of its user community.
Since then, the current fourth generation of FLUKA has included the treatment of coherent effects experienced by high energy hadron beams in crystal devices, such as channeling, and the synchrotron radiation emission during charged particle transport in vacuum regions subject to magnetic fields, relevant to various applications. Moreover, a model for low-energy deuteron interactions, from threshold up to 300 MeV, has been developed and released, eventually overcoming a persisting lack. Lately, a major milestone such as the point-wise transport of low-energy neutrons has been finalized. This enables respective event-by-event simulations, without implying major penalties in the calculation time. In addition, direct (p,n) reactions to the Isobaric Analogue State of several target isotopes have been described, while refining reaction cross-sections for proton and alpha projectiles.
The code has been provided with the Arc-DPA estimation capability. Work on the improvement of nuclear elastic scattering is ongoing.
User experience has been enhanced thanks to new cards offering a variety of built-in magnetic field options and a new template for custom sources.
In parallel, as part of a systematic quality assurance plan, a continuous integration pipeline to automatically validate the codebase, now managed through the CERN GitLab instance, is complemented by automatic processing and analysis of a tailored physics-case test suite (FLUKAVAL). The latter probes the release-candidate FLUKA version both at model/interaction level and on full-scale examples representing real case applications.