Extension of the Liège Intranuclear Cascade Model to the 2-15 GeV Incident Energy Range

The Liège Intra-Nuclear Cascade model (INCL4) has been shown to be quite successful for the description of spallation reactions. However its validity domain is limited to an upper incident energy of ~2 GeV, because inelastic elementary processes are restricted to the excitation and de-excitation of the Delta resonance. In this thesis, the INCL4 model is extended to higher incident energy. This is realised by including other inelastic elementary collisions, direct multipion production in elementary nucleon-nucleon and pion-nucleon collisions. This is somehow opposite to the usual extension to high energy of such models, as it is usually realised by including excitation of heavier baryonic resonances. Experimental data and isospin symmetry have been
exploited in the implementation of multipion channels, but we could not avoid to introduce specific
models for the energy-momentum and charge repartition on the final pions. The predictions of the modified model for production of protons, neutrons and charged pions by proton and pion beams off nuclei are compared with experimental data. A short study on nuclear fragmentation is also presented.