MONET code: evaluation of the dose in Hadrontherapy

The energy deposition of Helium ion beams in a water target was investigated with the development of a new model. The model, called MONET (MOdel of ioN dosE for Therapy), evaluates the 3D energy deposition distribution for protons in a water phantom. In this work, the code is extended to calculate the energy distribution of Helium ions and renamed MONETα. The code evaluates the lateral and longitudinal terms starting from first principles and has been validated with FLUKA, which is currently used in many hadrontherapy centers and is continuously validated with experimental data. The MONET code accounts for all the physical effects of the interaction of Helium ions with water and is based on well known and validated theories. The advantage of our model are the physical foundation, the small number of parameters, the fast calculation time and the accuracy.