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Primary GCR interact with the Earth's atmosphere originating atmospheric showers, thus giving rise to fluxes of secondary particles in the atmosphere. Electromagnetic and hadronic interactions interplay in the production of these particles, whose detection is performed by means of complementary techniques in different energy ranges and at different depths in the atmosphere, down to the Earth's surface. Monte Carlo codes are essential calculation tools which can describe the complexity of the physics of these phenomena, thus allowing the analysis of experimental data. However, these codes are affected by important uncertainties, concerning, in particular, hadronic physics at high energy. In this paper we shall report some results concerning inclusive particle fluxes and atmospheric shower properties as obtained using the FLUKA transport and interaction code. Some emphasis will also be given to the validation of the physics models of FLUKA involved in these calculations., Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures. Proceedings of an invited talk presented by M.V. Garzelli at CSSP07, Carpathian Summer School of Physics - Exotic Nuclei & Nuclear/Particle Astrophysics, Sinaia, Romania, August 20 - 31 2007

Bifibrations, in symplectic geometry called also dual pairs, play a relevant role in the theory of superintegrable Hamiltonian systems. We prove the existence of an analogous bifibrated geometry in dynamical systems with a symmetry group such that the reduced dynamics is periodic. The integrability of such systems has been proven by M. Field and J. Hermans with a reconstruction technique. We apply the result to the nonholonomic system of a ball rolling on a surface of revolution., Comment: This is a contribution to the Proc. of workshop on Geometric Aspects of Integrable Systems (July 17-19, 2006; Coimbra, Portugal), published in SIGMA (Symmetry, Integrability and Geometry: Methods and Applications) at http://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA/

FLUKA is a general purpose Monte Carlo transport and interaction code used for fundamental physics and for a wide range of applications. These include Cosmic Ray Physics (muons, neutrinos, EAS, underground physics), both for basic research and applied studies in space and atmospheric flight dosimetry and radiation damage. A review of the hadronic models available in FLUKA and relevant for the description of cosmic ray air showers is presented in this paper. Recent updates concerning these models are discussed. The FLUKA capabilities in the simulation of the formation and propagation of EM and hadronic showers in the Earth's atmosphere are shown., Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures. Invited talk presented by M.V. Garzelli at ISVHECRI2006, International Symposium on Very High Energy Cosmic Rays, Weihai, China, August 15 - 22 2006

Heavy-ion collisions can be simulated by means of comprehensive approaches, to include the many different reaction mechanisms which may contribute. QMD models and their relativistic extensions are examples of these approaches based on Monte Carlo techniques. In this paper are shown some results obtained by coupling a new QMD code, which describes the fast stage of ion-ion collisions, to the evaporation /fission/Fermi break-up and photon de-excitation routines present in the FLUKA multipurpose Monte Carlo transport and interaction code. In particular, we compare the predicted neutron spectra to available experimental data from thin and thick target irradiations. We show also some predictions of particle and charged fragment fluences for the interaction of C and Fe ions with a thick PMMA target, which may be useful to assess the risk of side-effects in the hadron therapy of tumours., Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures. Proceedings of the 25th Workshop on Nuclear Theory, Rila Mountains, Bulgaria, June 26 - July 1, 2006

A new code, based on the Quantum Molecular Dynamics theoretical approach, has been developed and interfaced to the FLUKA evaporation/fission/Fermi break-up module. At present, this code is undergoing a series of validation tests. In this paper its predictions are compared to measured charged fragment yields and double differential neutron spectra in thin target heavy-ion reactions, at bombarding energies of about 100 MeV/A. The comparisons with the predictions of a modified version of RQMD 2.4 originally developed in Frankfurt, already available in the FLUKA code, are presented and potential improvements are briefly sketched., Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, Proc. 11th International Conference on Nuclear Reaction Mechanisms, Varenna, Italy, June 12 - 16 2006

The FLUKA Monte Carlo code, presently used in cosmic ray physics, contains packages to sample soft hadronic processes which are built according to the Dual Parton Model. This is a phenomenological model capable of reproducing many of the features of hadronic collisions in the non perturbative QCD regime. The basic principles of the model are summarized and, as an example, the associated Lambda-K production is discussed. This is a process which has some relevance for the calculation of atmospheric neutrino fluxes., Comment: Extended version of the work for the proceedings of the workshop on QCD at Cosmic Ray Energies, Erice, Aug. 30 - Sep. 4 2004, Italy

A description of the intermediate and high energy hadronic interaction models used in the FLUKA code is given. Benchmarking against experimental data is also reported in order to validate the model performances. Finally the most recent developments and perspectives for nucleus-nucleus interactions are described together with some comparisons with experimental data., Comment: talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 10 pages, ps

The main features of the FLUKA Monte Carlo code, which can deal with transport and interaction of electromagnetic and hadronic particles, are summarised. The physical models embedded in FLUKA are mentioned, as well as examples of benchmarking against experimental data. A short history of the code is provided and the following examples of applications are discussed in detail: prediction of calorimetric performances, atmospheric neutrino flux calculations, dosimetry in atmosphere and radiobiology applications, including hadrontherapy and space radiation protection. Finally a few lines are dedicated to the FLUKA server, from which the code can be downloaded., Comment: talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 8 pages, pdf

The concept of Virtual Monte Carlo (VMC) has been developed by the ALICE Software Project to allow different Monte Carlo simulation programs to run without changing the user code, such as the geometry definition, the detector response simulation or input and output formats. Recently, the VMC classes have been integrated into the ROOT framework, and the other relevant packages have been separated from the AliRoot framework and can be used individually by any other HEP project. The general concept of the VMC and its set of base classes provided in ROOT will be presented. Existing implementations for Geant3, Geant4 and FLUKA and simple examples of usage will be described., Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 8 pages, LaTeX, 6 eps figures. PSN THJT006. See http://root.cern.ch/root/vmc/VirtualMC.html

We obtain a global version of the Hamiltonian KAM theorem for invariant Lagrangean tori by glueing together local KAM conjugacies with help of a partition of unity. In this way we find a global Whitney smooth conjugacy between a nearly-integrable system and an integrable one. This leads to preservation of geometry, which allows us to define all the nontrivial geometric invariants like monodromy or Chern classes of an integrable system also for near integrable systems., Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure

The FLUKA Monte Carlo program is used to predict the distributions of the muons which originate from primary cosmic gamma rays and reach sea level. The main result is the angular distribution of muons produced by vertical gamma rays which is necessary to predict the inherent angular resolution of any instrument utilizing muons to infer properties of gamma ray primaries. Furthermore, various physical effects are discussed which affect these distributions in differing proportions., Comment: 36 pages, 13 figures, minor revision, new layout

Fast neutrons from cosmic-ray muons are an important background to underground low energy experiments. The estimate of such background is often hampered by the difficulty of measuring and calculating neutron production with sufficient accuracy. Indeed substantial disagreement exists between the different analytical calculations performed so far, while data reported by different experiments is not always consistent. We discuss a new unified approach to estimate the neutron yield, the energy spectrum, the multiplicity and the angular distribution from cosmic muons using the Monte Carlo simulation package FLUKA and show that it gives a good description of most of the existing measurements once the appropriate corrections have been applied., Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures

The FLUKA Monte Carlo program is used to calculate the effects of hadroproduction by primary gamma rays incident upon the earth's atmosphere; for the results presented in this paper, only primary angles at 0 degrees from zenith are considered. The FLUKA code is believed to be quite accurate in reproducing experimental photon hadroproduction data in the 1 GeV to 10 TeV energy range studied. The charged pions which are so produced can decay to muons with sufficient energy to reach ground level. The number of these muons and their radial and energy distribution are studied for incident gamma ray energies from 1 GeV to 10 TeV. The number of these muons is not negligible; they can, in certain circumstances, be used to study potential sources of gamma rays like gamma ray bursts. It is found, for example, that a 10 TeV incident primary gamma ray produces, on average, 3.4 muons which reach ground level; the gamma ray energy which produces the maximum number of muons at ground level depends on the spectral index of the primary gamma spectrum, a constant which describes how the primary gamma flux rises with decreasing primary energy. An example: for a differential spectral index of 2.7, there is a broad maximum number of muons coming from ~ 30 GeV primary gamma ray energy., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures. Updated and expanded version of 26th ICRC vol 2, 127 (1999); HE.3.2.20

We study the ellipticity and the ``Nekhoroshev stability'' (stability properties for finite, but very long, time scales) of the Riemann ellipsoids. We provide numerical evidence that the regions of ellipticity of the ellipsoids of types II and III are larger than those found by Chandrasekhar in the 60's and that all Riemann ellipsoids, except a finite number of codimension one subfamilies, are Nekhoroshev--stable. We base our analysis on a Hamiltonian formulation of the problem on a covering space, using recent results from Hamiltonian perturbation theory., Comment: 29 pages, 6 figures

Fast wire scanners are today considered as part of standard instrumentation in high energy synchrotrons. The extension of their use to synchrotrons working at lower energies, where Coulomb scattering can be important and the transverse beam size is large, introduces new complications considering beam heating of the wire, composition of the secondary particle shower and geometrical consideration in the detection set-up. A major problem in treating these effects is that the creation of secondaries in a thin carbon wire by a energetic primary beam is difficult to describe in an analytical way. We are here presenting new results from a full Monte Carlo simulation of this process yielding information on heat deposited in the wire, particle type and energy spectrum of secondaries and angular dependence as a function of primary beam energy. The results are used to derive limits for the use of wire scanners in low energy accelerators., Comment: 20 pages, 8 Postscript figures, uses elsart.cls