Inter-comparison of MARS and FLUKA: Predictions on energy deposition in LHC IR quadrupoles

Detailed modellings of the LHC insertion regions (IR) have earlier been performed to evaluate energy deposition in the IR superconducting magnets [1-4]. Proton-proton collisions at 14 TeV in the centre of mass lead to debris, depositing energy in the IR components. To evaluate uncertainties in those simulations and gain further confidence in the tools and approaches used, inter-comparison calculations have been performed with the latest versions of the FLUKA (2006.3b) [5, 6] and MARS15 [7, 8] Monte Carlo codes. These two codes, used worldwide for multi particle interaction and transport in accelerator, detector and shielding components, have been thoroughly benchmarked by the code authors and the user community (see, for example, recent [9, 10]). In the study described below, a better than 5% agreement was obtained for energy deposition calculated with these two codes based on different independent physics models for the identical geometry and initial conditions of a simple model representing the IR5 and its first quadrupole.