The ELIMED transport and dosimetry beamline for laser-driven ion beams

Abstract

This is the author's final version of the contribution published as: a b s t r a c t A growing interest of the scientific community towards multidisciplinary applications of laser-driven beams has led to the development of several projects aiming to demonstrate the possible use of these beams for therapeutic purposes. Nevertheless, laser-accelerated particles differ from the conventional beams typically used for multiscipilinary and medical applications, due to the wide energy spread, the angular divergence and the extremely intense pulses. The peculiarities of optically accelerated beams led to develop new strategies and advanced techniques for transport, diagnostics and dosimetry of the accelerated particles. In this framework, the realization of the ELIMED (ELI-Beamlines MEDical and multidisciplinary applications) beamline, developed by INFN-LNS (Catania, Italy) and that will be installed in 2017 as a part of the ELIMAIA beamline at the ELI-Beamlines (Extreme Light Infrastructure Beamlines) facility in Prague, has the aim to investigate the feasibility of using laser-driven ion beams for multidisciplinary applications. In this contribution, an overview of the beamline along with a detailed description of the main transport elements as well as the detectors composing the final section of the beamline will be presented.

Dose detectors, sensors, and their applications

“…The new emerging technologies for particle accelerators involve both novel ideas, such as laser‐driven accelerators, and developments of old concepts as synchrocyclotrons and Fixed Field Alternating Gradient Accelerators or cyclinacs . In most of these developments, the temporal structure of the beam will drastically change from the approximately constant intensity, supplied in beam spills by synchrotrons or all along the delivery time by cyclotrons.…”

Light Ion Accelerating Line (L3IA): Test experiment at ILIL-PW

“…Target optimisation and engineering, looking at different properties of surface, geometry and conductivity are becoming crucial in this effort, with nano-structured targets emerging as a potential breakthrough in table-top laser-driven ion sources development [9]. Finally, post acceleration is being tackled with special attention to selection, collimation [10] and injection in secondary acceleration structures, even using miniature targetdriven guiding devices [11].…”

Diagnostics and Dosimetry Solutions for Multidisciplinary Applications at the ELIMAIA Beamline

“…As a user multidisciplinary beam line aiming to explore the use of controllable and stable laser-drive proton/ion beams for applications, included the medical ones, the ELIMAIA beam line will be equipped of all the detectors required to perform accurate dosimetry and will provide all the tools to let the users carry out the proposed experiments. Devices for beam monitoring and detectors for relative and absolute dosimetry have been realized for accurately characterizing the beam shot-by-shot and they have been installing along the in-air final section of the ELIMAIA beamline [31]. They will be set up in a way that the relative position of these dosimeters can be easily changed according to the user needs, thus addressing different requirements in terms of transported energy and delivered dose.…”

“…Following the described approaches and after a preliminary tuning of the beam transport aiming to provide single shot doses of a few cGy, sample irradiations of the order of few Gy/min could be achieved, provided a laser repetition rate of about 1 Hz [31]. These are preliminary predictions, according to the Geant4 Monte Carlo code specially developed to simulate the ELIMED application line [42].…”