Comparison of selected general-purpose event generators for particle fluence simulation in LHC silicon trackers

At the LHC era, the detector systems are operating at the harsh hadronic environment with the unprecedentedly high particle flux. Position-sensitive silicon devices are usually positioned at the innermost regions of the experimental setups and must cope with highly non-uniform radiation fields. At the end of LHC Run 2, fluence in silicon trackers reached 101⁵ ne_q/cm². Initial simulation studies predict that the maximal fluence for the HL-LHC may be up to two orders of magnitude higher than the one seen in LHC Run 1 and Run 2. In this paper, two general-purpose physics event generators used for simulation of proton-proton collisions for the radiation damage studies at LHC energies: PYTHIA 8.2 and DPMJET-III are compared. Fluences obtained using these models, with the latest tuning to the LHC data, in detectors situated close to the proton-proton interaction point are determined as well. We also indicate a potential new method for actual fluence estimation using experiment real-time data monitoring system.