Benchmarking Nuclear Reaction Models of the FLUKA Monte Carlo Code for Heavy Ion Collisions

In this report, I summarize the work conducted during my eight weeks as a summer student in the EN-STI-FLU department of CERN. The work focused on the benchmarking of FLUKA double differential cross sections of secondary fragments produced in fixed-target heavy ion collisions in the beam energy range between 10 MeV/nucleon and 1 GeV/nucleon. Specifically, the accuracy of FLUKA models for nucleus-nucleus interactions, namely the Boltzmann Master Equation (BME) and the relativistic Quantum Molecular Dynamics (rQMD) models, were analyzed. Furthermore, we compared the FLUKA production version 2011.2x.6 with the FLUKA development version 2018.2 and found that the latter is a considerable improvement to the former. Nevertheless, further improvements are required to better reproduce the experimental data. The major refinements needed are presented and discussed in this report.