RADIATION PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY, cilt.226, 2025 (SCI-Expanded)
Radiotherapy, one of the cancer treatment strategies, uses ionizing radiation to destroy cancer cells. It is very important to know the photon interaction parameters of curcumin, which has both anti-cancer and cancerprotective properties, to determine the penetration and energy accumulation in the interaction of radiation with tissue. In this work, the linear attenuation coefficient (LAC, mu), mass attenuation coefficient (MAC, mu/rho), mean free path (MFP), half value layer (HVL), effective atomic number (Z(eff)), and electron density (Nel) of curcumin and temozolomide have been determined experimentally at 53.16 keV, 80.99 keV, 276.39 keV, 302.85 keV, 356.61 keV and 383.84 keV photon energies emitted from Ba-133 point source by using the ULEGe detector. Besides, the radiation interaction parameters were calculated theoretically using the EpiXS software program. Also, the exposure buildup factors (EBF and EABF) of these compounds were determined up to 40 mfp in the energy range 0.015-15 MeV. The experimental and theoretical mass attenuation coefficients have been found to agree. The gamma-ray absorption efficiency of curcumin is approximately 3.89% higher than that of temozolomide. Temozolomide has approximately 25.6% higher fast neutron removal cross-section than curcumin.