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Ionization of biological molecules by multicharged ions using the stoichiometric model

In the present work, we investigate the ionization of molecules of biological interest by the impact of multicharged ions in the intermediate to high energy range. We performed full non-perturbative distorted-wave calculations (CDW) for thirty-six collisional systems composed by six atomic targets: H, C, N, O, F, and S -which are the constituents of most of the DNA and biological molecules- and six charged projectiles (antiprotons, H, He, B, C, and O). On account of the radiation damage caused by secondary electrons, we inspect the energy and angular distributions of the emitted electrons from the atomic targets. We examine seventeen molecules: DNA and RNA bases, DNA backbone, pyrimidines, tetrahydrofuran (THF), and C n H n compounds. We show that the simple stoichiometric model (SSM), which approximates the molecular ionization cross sections as a linear combination of the atomic ones, gives reasonably good results for complex molecules. We also inspect the extensively used Toburen scaling of the total ionization cross sections of molecules with the number of weakly bound electrons. Based on the atomic CDW results, we propose new active electron numbers, which leads to a better universal scaling for all the targets and ions studied here in the intermediate to the high energy region. The new scaling describes well the available experimental data for proton impact, including small molecules. We perform full molecular calculations for five nucleobases and test a modified stoichiometric formula based on the Mulliken charge of the composite atoms. The difference introduced by the new stoichiometric formula is less than 3%, which indicates the reliability of the SSM to deal with this type of molecules. The results of the extensive ion-target examination included in the present study allow us to assert that the SSM and the CDW-based scaling will be useful tools in this area.