M. Mauri

A fast monitoring system for radiotherapeutic proton beams based on scintillating screens and a CCD camera

A facility in which a 62 MeV proton beam is employed in the radiotherapeutic treatment of several ocular disease has been active since March 2002 at Laboratori Nazionali del Sud. A fast and accurate quality control system of such beam has been designed and tested. The system consists of a scintillating screen mounted perpendicularly to the beam axis at a fixed distance and observed by a highly sensitive charge-coupled device camera. The basic idea is the possibility to obtain real time information about the relative spatial dose distribution delivered to tissue through the measurement of the light emission in the scintillating screen. A comparison with the presently used dosimetric system (a motorized silicon diode) that, in the future, will be replaced by the device introduced in this paper (if its experimental performance will be successful) has been carried out. The good capabilities of the system make it worthy of further investigations into its applicability in proton beams monitoring for radiotherapeutic treatments (i.e., reconstruction of depth dose distribution and beam monitoring during patient irradiation).

Study of the Dynamics in a Linac Booster for Proton Therapy in the 30-62 MeV Energy Range

Recent results in accelerator physics have shown the feasibility of a coupling scheme between a cyclotron and a linac for proton acceleration. Cyclotrons with energies up to 30 MeV, mainly devoted to radioisotopes production, are available in a large number of medical centres. These two evidences have suggested the idea to study and design a linac booster able to increase the initial proton energy up to the values required for the treatment of tumors, like the ocular ones. One of the main challenges in such a project is related to meet the requirement of having sufficient mean current for therapy from a given injection current coming from the cyclotron. In this paper we will review the rationale of the project in order to optimize the transmittance and to minimize the duty-cycle. In this frame we will discuss the basic design of a compact 3GHz linac, from 30 to 62 MeV, with a new approach to the cavities used in a SCL (Side Coupled Linac) structure (PALME project).

A New Tuning Method for Resonant Coupling Structures

In order to have efficient particle acceleration it is fundamental that the particles experience, in the accelerating gap, field amplitudes as uniform and as high as possible from gap to gap. Because of the unavoidable fabrication errors, an accelerating structure, when assembled, exhibits field values lower than the nominal ones and/or not uniform. All the usual procedures developed in order to adjust the parameter deviations responsible of the malfunctioning of these structures, are based on field amplitude measurements, by using the bead pull technique, which is a very invasive technique. In this paper the philosophy is reversed: it is assumed that all the information can be got by Sounding the Modes of the whole System (SMS) and correct the deviation of each frequency mode from its nominal value by means of an appropriate tuning of the cavities: resorting to a perturbative technique applied to a circuit model representing this kind of structures, it is possible to calculate the amount of tuning to give to the cavities. It will be shown that a very good equalization and maximization of the fields in the cavities can be achieved by using this technique.

Study and design of room temperature cavities for an RF compressor prototype

The generation of high brightness electron beams with sub-ps bunch length at kA peak currents is a crucial requirement in the design of injectors for Linac based X- Ray FELs. In the last years the proposal to use a slow wave RF structure as a rectilinear compressor in this range of interest, to overcome the difficulties related to magnetic compressors, has been widely discussed in the accelerator physics community. In this paper the results in the design and study of a 3 GHz model structure will be presented.