FLUKA is a general purpose Monte Carlo code able to describe the transport and interaction of any particle and nucleus type in complex geometries over an energy range extending from thermal neutrons ...to ultrarelativistic hadron collisions. It has many different applications in accelerator design, detector studies, dosimetry, radiation protection, medical physics, and space research. In 2019, CERN and INFN, as FLUKA copyright holders, together decided to end their formal collaboration framework, allowing them henceforth to pursue different pathways aimed at meeting the evolving requirements of the FLUKA user community, and at ensuring the long term sustainability of the code. To this end, CERN set up the FLUKA.CERN Collaboration
1
. This paper illustrates the physics processes that have been newly released or are currently implemented in the code distributed by the FLUKA.CERN Collaboration
2
under new licensing conditions that are meant to further facilitate access to the code, as well as intercomparisons. The description of coherent effects experienced by high energy hadron beams in crystal devices, relevant to promising beam manipulation techniques, and the charged particle tracking in vacuum regions subject to an electric field, overcoming a former lack, have already been made available to the users. Other features, namely the different kinds of low energy deuteron interactions as well as the synchrotron radiation emission in the course of charged particle transport in vacuum regions subject to magnetic fields, are currently undergoing systematic testing and benchmarking prior to release. FLUKA is widely used to evaluate radiobiological effects, with the powerful support of the Flair graphical interface, whose new generation (Available at
http://flair.cern
) offers now additional capabilities, e.g., advanced 3D visualization with photorealistic rendering and support for industry-standard volume visualization of medical phantoms. FLUKA has also been playing an extensive role in the characterization of radiation environments in which electronics operate. In parallel, it has been used to evaluate the response of electronics to a variety of conditions not included in radiation testing guidelines and standards for space and accelerators, and not accessible through conventional ground level testing. Instructive results have been obtained from Single Event Effects (SEE) simulations and benchmarks, when possible, for various radiation types and energies. The code has reached a high level of maturity, from which the FLUKA.CERN Collaboration is planning a substantial evolution of its present architecture. Moving towards a modern programming language allows to overcome fundamental constraints that limited development options. Our long term goal, in addition to improving and extending its physics performances with even more rigorous scientific oversight, is to modernize its structure to integrate independent contributions more easily and to formalize quality assurance through state-of-the-art software deployment techniques. This includes a continuous integration pipeline to automatically validate the codebase as well as automatic processing and analysis of a tailored physics-case test suite. With regard to the aforementioned objectives, several paths are currently envisaged, like finding synergies with Geant4, both at the core structure and interface level, this way offering the user the possibility to run with the same input different Monte Carlo codes and crosscheck the results.
Human nutrition science has greatly developed in the past decades, turning from the consideration of foods as simply energy sources to the recognition of their role in maintaining health and in ...reducing disease risks: Foodomics is a new science that studies Food and Nutrition domains through the application and integration of advanced “omics” technologies to improve consumer's well-being, health, and knowledge. In recent years, wild food plants have become very attractive to the food industry, prompting their use as replacements for synthetic chemicals and nutraceuticals: in this sense, mulberry is a very important resource for its phytochemical composition, nutritional value, and antioxidant properties.
The aim of this study was to describe mulberry fruit quality traits and report on the level of potentially bioactive compounds (HPLC fingerprint) and their influence on total fruit phytocomplex and antioxidant activity in comparison to the most common fruits.
Mulberry was identified as a rich source of antioxidant compounds; the observed analytical fingerprint demonstrated that the species (and in particular the considered genotype) represents a rich source of phytochemicals, as organic acids, monoterpenes and polyphenolic compounds, especially flavonols and anthocyanins, which led to reasonably good overall fruit quality.
This study developed an important tool to assess mulberry quality, chemical composition, and bioactivity, using different chromatographic methods for comprehensive authentication and quality control of its fruits: this research showed that analytical fingerprinting could be an important tool for studies of Foodomics, helping to find new sources of natural health-promoting compounds.
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•Fingerprinting uses the concentration of nutraceuticals to describe the fruit.•An analytical study of mulberry fruit was performed.•Morus spp. represent a rich source of phytochemicals.•Analytical fingerprinting could be an important tool for studies of Foodomics.
Centuries of co-evolution between Castanea spp. biodiversity and human populations has resulted in the spread of rich and varied chestnut genetic diversity throughout most of the world, especially in ...mountainous and forested regions. Its plasticity and adaptability to different pedoclimates and the wide genetic variability of the species determined the spread of many different ecotypes and varieties in the wild. Throughout the centuries, man has used, selected and preserved these different genotypes, vegetatively propagating them by grafting, for many applications: fresh consumption, production of flour, animal nutrition, timber production, thereby actively contributing to the maintenance of the natural biodiversity of the species, and providing an excellent example of conservation horticulture. Nonetheless, currently the genetic variability of the species is critically endangered and hundreds of ecotypes and varieties are at risk of being lost due to a number of phytosanitary problems (canker blight, Chryphonectria parasitica; ink disease, Phytophthora spp.; gall wasp, Dryocosmus kuriphilus), and because of the many years of decline and abandonment of chestnut cultivation, which resulted in the loss of the binomial male chestnut. Recently, several research and experimentation programmes have attempted to develop strategies for the conservation of chestnut biodiversity. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the status of biodiversity conservation of the species and to present the results of a 7 year project aimed at the individuation and study of genetic diversity and conservation of Castanea spp. germplasm.
The High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) project aims at accumulating 3000 fb -1 in the years 2023-2035, i.e., ten times more w.r.t. the nominal LHC performance expected for 2010-2021. One key element to ...reach this challenging performance is a new insertion region to reduce the beam size in the interaction point by approximately a factor two. This requires larger aperture magnets in the region spanning from the interaction point to the matching section quadrupoles. This aperture has been fixed to 150 mm for the inner triplet quadrupoles in 2012. In this paper, we give a first baseline of the interaction region. We discuss the main motivations that lead us to choose the technology, the combination of fields/gradients and lengths, the apertures, the quantity of superconductor, and the operational margin. Key elements are also the constraints given by the energy deposition in terms of heat load and radiation damage; we present the main features related to shielding and heat removal.
The rate of inelastic nuclear interactions in a short bent silicon crystal was precisely measured for the first time using a 180 GeV/c positive hadron beam produced in the North Experimental Area of ...the CERN SPS. An angular asymmetry dependence on the crystal orientation in the vicinity of the planar channeling minimum has been observed. For the inspected crystal, this probability is about
∼
20
%
larger than in the amorphous case because of the atomic density increase along the particle trajectories in the angular range of volume reflection, whose dimension is determined by the crystal bending angle. Instead, for the opposite angular orientation with respect to the planar channeling, there is a smaller probability excess of
∼
4
%
.
Lycium
spp. fruit (goji or wolfberry) has become more popular due to its public acceptance as a functional food or “super food/fruit”. The aim of this study was to describe the influence of two ...different drying systems (air-thermal and freeze drying) on fresh and dried goji fruit nutraceutical traits and report on the level of potentially bioactive compounds and their effects on total fruit phytocomplex and antioxidant activity. Spectrophotometric and chromatographic methods coupled to multivariate analysis were performed on all the goji samples. In this research, goji fresh and dried fruits were identified as a source of compounds with potential health-promoting properties. The results of this study showed that freeze drying allowed to preserve most of the phytochemical characteristics of the fresh fruits, as phenolic acids (ferulic and ellagic acids) and vitamin C content. Moreover, polyphenols could be selected as biomarkers in order to distinguish different
Lycium
species or the same
Lycium
genotype from different geographical areas. This research emphasizes that an adequate evaluation of nutraceutical traits is necessary in order to select the higher-quality raw materials (cultivated varieties): as a cost-effective and efficient way to trace food, this study showed that HPLC fingerprint can be used to identify and track different raw materials (fresh fruits) and derived food products (dried fruits).
Recently, the fingerprint approach using chromatography has become one of the most effective tools for quality assessment of herbal medicines and food supplements: due to the complexity of the ...chromatographic fingerprint and the irreproducibility of chromatographic instruments and experimental conditions, chemometric approach is employed to deal with the chromatographic fingerprint. The study was aimed at developing new analytical methods for the multivariate phytochemical fingerprinting of bioactive compounds in eight tree-species bud-preparations, commonly used in phytotherapy. Methods was used to identify and quantify the main bioactive compounds (polyphenols, organic acids and vitamins), and obtain a specific botanical profile in order to assess the contribution of each single bioactive class to the total bud preparation phytocomplex. A chemometric approach was used to distinguish among different genotypes assuring the identity, safety and quality of the botanical raw materials. The established protocol was simple, sensitive and reliable and it could be used for the evaluation and quality control of bud-extracts and natural food supplements: the proposed method was successfully applied to the characterization of commercial bud-preparations, demonstrating to be an effective tool for the fingerprinting of this plant material. The new approach developed in this study represents a good alternative for improving the classification results of herbal materials with complex chromatograms. It should be necessary to develop a “multivariate chromatographic fingerprint”, in order to differentiate the herbal preparations according to their genotype, avoiding substitutions, changes or adulterations with other species or synthetic drugs.
•The antioxidants in goji berry fruits might confer many health protective benefits.•Goji is recently considered as functional food thanks to its antioxidant properties.•Analytical fingerprint may be ...useful to better understand the nutraceutical traits.
The antioxidants in goji berry (Lycium spp.) fruits might confer many health protective benefits by alleviating oxidative stress. The aim of this study was to describe quality traits and the level of potentially bioactive compounds (HPLC fingerprint) and their influence on fruit phytocomplex and antioxidant activity in goji in comparison with the most common fruits. Goji berry was identified as a rich source of antioxidant compounds, with health-promoting properties comparable with other common fruit species. The obtained fingerprint may be useful to better understand the nutraceutical traits of this species recently considered as functional food thanks to its antioxidant properties.
•Amelanchier canadensis (L.) Med. is an alternative tree species with health benefits.•An analytical study of serviceberry fresh fruits was performed.•Fingerprinting used the concentration of ...phytochemicals for bioactivity evaluation.•Canadensis fruits could be useful for the health–food industry.
Amelanchier canadensis (L.) Medik., commonly called serviceberry, is a potential functional food that is also used for its medicinal purposes. This work evaluated the potential of a cultivated serviceberry species as a functional food by characterising its physicochemical characteristics, antioxidant capacity, vitamin C, phenolics and other phytochemicals selected as health-promoting biomarkers, using high-performance liquid chromatography. The most important compound class identified was polyphenols (62.10%), followed by organic acids (22.63%), monoterpenes (7.95%), and vitamins (7.32%). Results showed that serviceberry fruits could be good sources of phenolic constituents, as catechins (343.46 ± 29.46 mg/100 gFW), anthocyanins (220.66 ± 17.43 mg/100 gFW), and tannins (209.29 ± 7.81 mg/100 gFW) (FW = fresh weight). These results highlight the potential role of A. canadensis fruits as a functional food. Further studies are needed to identify several genotypes for breeding to get suitable cultivars for fresh consumption and processing.
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