UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

Machine learning for the prediction of stopping powers

Parfitt, WA; Jackman, RB; (2020) Machine learning for the prediction of stopping powers. Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research, Section B: Beam Interactions with Materials and Atoms , 478 pp. 21-33. 10.1016/j.nimb.2020.05.015. Green open access

[thumbnail of Jackman_Manuscript.pdf]
Preview
Text
Jackman_Manuscript.pdf - Accepted Version

Download (9MB) | Preview

Abstract

The stopping power of a material upon interaction with an energetic ion is the key measure of how far that ion will travel. The implications of accurate particle range calculations are tremendous, affecting every single application in which particle radiation is involved, from nuclear power to medicine. An approach is presented which attempts to overcome current shortcomings in the theoretical understanding of stopping power, as well as the methods used to interpret and exploit measured data. This is a considerable challenge, however the use of a novel machine learning methodology is shown to hold great promise in this endeavour: the ultimate aim being the ability to correctly predict the stopping value for any energy, ion and target combination, having no pre-existing experimental data. A random forest regression algorithm is trained using over 34,000 experimental measurements, representing stopping power values for 522 ion-target combinations across the energy range 10-3 to 102 MeV/amu, and ion and target atomic masses 1 to >240. Evaluation is carried out using several fundamental error metrics, over the whole dataset as well as for individual combinations, to provide the most comprehensive understanding of performance when tested under strict cross-validation criteria. The resulting model is shown to yield predicted stopping power curves corresponding closely to those of the true experimental values, with an ability to generalise across target elements, compounds, mixtures, alloys and polymers, irrespective of phase, and for a wide range of ion masses.

Type: Article
Title: Machine learning for the prediction of stopping powers
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1016/j.nimb.2020.05.015
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nimb.2020.05.015
Language: English
Additional information: © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY/4.0/).
Keywords: Machine learning, Random forest, Stopping power, SRIM
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Electronic and Electrical Eng
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10101647
Downloads since deposit
132Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item