  Given the unprecedented effective area, the new ATHENA Silicon Pore Optics
(SPO) focusing technology, the dynamic and variable L2 environment, where no
X-ray mission has flown up to date, a dedicated Geant4 simulation campaign is
needed to evaluate the impact of low energy protons scattering on the ATHENA
mirror surface and the induced residual background level on its X-ray
detectors. The Geant4 mass model is built as part of the ESA AREMBES project
activities using the BoGEMMS framework. An SPO mirror module row is the atomic
unit of the mass model, allowing the simulation of the full structure by means
of 20 independent runs, one for each row. Thanks to the BoGEMMS configuration
files, both single pores, mirror modules or the entire SPO row can be built
with the same Geant4 geometry. Both Remizovich, in its elastic approximation,
and Coulomb single scattering Geant4 models are used in the interaction of
mono-energetic proton beams with a single SPO pore. The scattering efficiency
for the first model is almost twice the efficiency obtained with the latter but
for both cases we obtain similar polar and azimuthal angular distributions,
with about 70-75% of scatterings generated by single or double reflections. The
soft proton flux modelled for the plasma sheet region is used as input for the
simulation of soft proton funnelling by the full SPO mass model. A much weaker
soft proton vignetting than the one observed by XMM-Newton EPIC detectors is
generated by ATHENA mirrors. The residual soft proton flux reaching the focal
plane, defined as a 15 cm radius, is 10^4 times lower than the input L2 soft
proton population entering the mirror, at the same energy, with rates
comparable or higher than the ones observed in XMM EPIC-pn most intense soft
proton flares.
