Successful cooperation between Department 6.3 and Korea Institute of Fusion Energy

The successful cooperation between the Department 6.3 "Radiation Protection Dosimetry" and the Division "Fundamental Technology" of the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE), which began in 2019, has been extended for a further two years. The KFE is a member of the international experimental reactor ITER and it also operates its own superconducting fusion research facility. It is one of the world's leading institutes in the field of determining basic atomic and molecular data for interaction processes with charged particles. The aim of the collaboration is to use cost-saving synergy effects by not only pooling the expertise of both institutes, but also sharing experimental capacities. The determination of electron interaction cross‑sections of human tissue components is just one example of this collaboration, which exploits the KFE’s high‑level expertise and experimental capacities for low‑energy electrons, and the experience of Department 6.3 in determining the cross‑sections over an energy range between 50 eV and 2 keV. These are important input data required for accurate calculation of the dose distribution in human organs in radiation therapy using Monte Carlo simulation. The cooperation between the two institutes will expand to include environmental applications in the near future. One such activity is the determination of the production rate of reactive radicals produced from the excitation of natural and anthropogenic atmospheric gases by cosmic radiation. As these reactive radicals act as catalysts to increase ozone depletion in the stratosphere, such data is particularly important for the development and validation of climate models.

Contact person at PTB:

Woon Yong Baek, Department 6.3, Working Group 6.36