Dear Prof. Tervo,

I introduce myself. I am Prof. Alain Hebert, from Polytechnique Montreal. My field of investigation is nuclear reactor physics and neutron transport. Recently, a medical-oriented research organization in Montreal, TransMedTech, asked me to adapt our neutron transport code, based on discrete ordinates method (aka SN method) to photon and electron transport for radio-oncology applications. Our neutron transport code is specific by its capability to operate in HPC mode with thousands of parallel threads. However, our code is currently limited to neutral particles (neutrons and photons) and its extension to electrons would require a numerical discretization similar to the one you develop in your paper entitled: “A finite-element model of electron transport in radiation therapy and a related inverse problem”.

Our research program would proceed in two phases:

(1) from now to January 2021: Develop a 1D discretization for the Galerkin finite-element approximation of the Boltzmann equation for electrons, similar to your code, and validate the results with respect to GEANT4 reference results.

(2) from January 2021 to December 2021: Develop a corresponding 3D discretization with OpenMP multi-threading for a matrix of voxels.

In my opinion, a collaboration with an expert group in charged particle transport is mandatory to succeed. Would you accept such a collaboration? I am proposing one or two join papers on the subject, together with my graduate students. What is the state of your finite element code (language, size, documentation, QA)? Would you accept to share this code? We are currently developing under the LGPL license.

Thank you in advance for your answer,

Alain Hebert

professor

Mechanical Engineering

Polytechnique Montreal

PS: I tried your email [email protected], but it was undelivered after 8 hours.