Experiment FIRST: Fragmentation of 12C beam at 400 MeV/u

The knowledge about fragmentation processes in ion-ion interactions is fundamental in hadrontherapy and radiation protection in space missions. Hadrontherapy, based on
¹²
C, features many advantages with respect to conventional radiation therapy with photons due to the possibility to shape the dose delivery region in tissues but side effects of the projectile fragmentation in healthy tissues are not negligible. NASA recently pointed out that measurements for some light ions and kinetic energies are missing in nuclear fragmentation databases.