Nanop: An x-ray to gold nanoparticle electron and photon emission software

Nanoparticles have been explored as radiosensitizers for cancer radiotherapy. While the nanoparticle radiotherapy improvement has been clearly observed, there is still a debate over the physical and biological mechanisms leading to this result. In particular, the role of electrons and photons emitted by nanoparticle after x-ray absorption is not well understood and their energies are not well known. Therefore, we developed in this paper a new model to determine the electron and photon emission spectra of nanoparticles irradiated by x-ray photons. This model is implemented, for a gold nanoparticle, in a newly available software called Nanop which allows anyone to determine gold nanoparticle photon and electron emissions.