• E.B. Hug
  PSI/Center for Proton Therapy, Villigen

As 3D-con­for­mal treat­ment has be­come the clear­ly ac­cept­ed goal of ra­di­a­tion on­col­o­gy, charged par­ti­cle treat­ment with pro­tons and heav­ier ions as­cend­ed to the fore­front. After three decades of > 50,000 treat­ed pa­tients, pro­ton ra­dio­ther­a­py has es­tab­lished it­self as an ac­cept­ed and often pre­ferred treat­ment modal­i­ty for tu­mors re­quir­ing high-dose con­for­mal ir­ra­di­a­tion. It has con­tin­u­ous­ly demon­strat­ed its abil­i­ty of dose re­duc­tion to nor­mal tis­sues, thus be­com­ing the RT modal­i­ty of choice for pe­di­atric ma­lig­nan­cies. Si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly, heav­ier ions, no­tably car­bon ion ther­a­py, have been de­vel­oped at fewer cen­ters, in­volv­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly 5,000 pa­tients world­wide. The ra­tio­nal is pri­mar­i­ly based on a com­pa­ra­ble dose dis­tri­bu­tion com­pared to pro­tons but with the po­ten­tial ben­e­fit of in­creased bi­o­log­ic ef­fec­tive­ness. Ra­diore­sis­tant tu­mors are be­lieved to ben­e­fit most from car­bon ion ther­a­py. The cur­rent sta­tus of clin­i­cal re­sults will be dis­cussed. The ma­jor­i­ty of clin­i­cal data have been ob­tained on rare, but dif­fi­cult to treat tu­mors, for ex­am­ple mes­enchy­mal tu­mors of the skull base and paraspinal re­gion. Here, an ap­prox­i­mate 10-15% tumor con­trol ad­van­tage has been ob­served for par­ti­cle ther­a­py. Most clin­i­cal data are based on Phase I/II pro­to­cols. The an­tic­i­pat­ed fu­ture di­rec­tion of the role of par­ti­cle ther­a­py in medicine is a com­plex sub­ject and in­volves an in­ter­play of ra­dio-bi­ol­o­gy, ac­cel­er­a­tor physics and ra­di­a­tion on­col­o­gy.

Slides

• K. Noda
  NIRS, Chiba-shi

Heavy-ion beams have at­trac­tive grow­ing in­ter­est for can­cer treat­ment owing to their high dose lo­cal­iza­tion at the Bragg peak as well as high bi­o­log­i­cal ef­fect there. Re­cent­ly, there­fore, heavy-ion can­cer treat­ments have been suc­cess­ful­ly car­ried out at var­i­ous fa­cil­i­ties and sev­er­al con­struc­tion pro­jects for the fa­cil­i­ty of the heavy-ion ther­a­py have also been pro­gress­ing in the world, based on the de­vel­op­ment of ac­cel­er­a­tor tech­nolo­gies.

Slides

• H.-A. Synal
  ETH/Ion Beam Physics Laboratory, Zürich

Ac­cel­er­a­tor Mass Spec­trom­e­try (AMS) pro­vides in­stru­men­ta­tion orig­i­nal­ly de­vel­oped by nu­cle­ar physi­cists more than 30 years ago to mea­sure long lived cos­mo­genic ra­dionu­clides such as ¹⁰Be, ¹⁴C, ²⁶Al, ³⁶Cl, ⁴¹Ca, ¹²⁹I, U, Pu and Pa at nat­u­ral lev­els. In the past ten years im­pres­sive progress in the mea­sure­ment tech­nique has been made and with the ap­pear­ance of com­pact low en­er­gy ra­dio­car­bon AMS sys­tems, a new cat­e­go­ry of AMS in­stru­ments has been in­tro­duced. This has re­sult­ed in a boom of new AMS fa­cil­i­ties with more than 20 new in­stal­la­tions over the last five years. But low en­er­gy AMS is not lim­it­ed to ra­dio­car­bon only and there is a great po­ten­tial for ¹⁰Be, ²⁶Al, ¹²⁹I and ac­tinides mea­sure­ments at com­pact AMS sys­tems. The lat­est de­vel­op­ments to­wards the low en­er­gy limit of AMS re­sult­ed in two new types of sys­tems, the NEC Sin­gle Stage AMS (SSAMS) and ETH mini car­bon dat­ing sys­tem (MI­CADAS) op­er­at­ing with ter­mi­nal volt­ages of about 200 kV only. In ad­di­tion, sys­tems like the HVEE 1 MV Tande­tron or the com­pact ETH 600 kV sys­tem are ca­pa­ble to ex­tent the range of ap­pli­ca­tions at com­pact sys­tems be­yond ra­dio­car­bon. These sys­tems will have enor­mous im­pact, not only on the use of AMS in biomed­i­cal re­search and on ra­dio­car­bon dat­ing but also for re­search ap­pli­ca­tions with ¹⁰Be, ²⁶Al, ¹²⁹I and ac­tinides.

Slides

• A.B. Alpat, M. Menichelli, A. Papi
  INFN/PG, Perugia
• R. Harboe-Sorensen
  ESA-ESTEC, Noordwijk
• G.A.P. Cirrone, F. Ferrera, P. Figuera, P. Finocchiaro, M. Lattuada, D. Rifuggiato
  INFN/LNS, Catania
• F. Bizzarri, D. Caraffini, M. Petasecca, F. Renzi
  MapRad, Perugia
• H. Denizli
  Abant Izzet Baysal Üniversitesi, Bolu
• O. Amutkan
  ODTU/Phys. Dept., Ankara

This paper de­scribes the beam mon­i­tor­ing sys­tem that has been de­vel­oped at the Su­per­con­duct­ing Cy­clotron at INFN-LNS (Is­ti­tu­to Nazionale di Fisi­ca Nu­cle­are, Lab­o­ra­tori Nazion­ali del Sud, Cata­nia, Italy) in order to mon­i­tor the beam pa­ram­e­ters such as en­er­gy, flux, beam pro­file, for SEE (Sin­gle Event Ef­fects) cross-sec­tions de­ter­mi­na­tion and DD (Dis­place­ment Dam­age) stud­ies. In order to have an ac­cu­rate and con­tin­u­ous mon­i­tor­ing of beam pa­ram­e­ters we have de­vel­oped fully au­to­mat­ic dosime­try setup to be used dur­ing SEE (with heavy ions) and DD (with pro­tons of 60 MeV/n) tests of elec­tron­ic de­vices and sys­tems. The final goal of our ac­tiv­i­ty is to demon­strate how op­er­at­ing in air, which in our ex­pe­ri­ence is eas­i­er than in vac­u­um, is not detri­men­tal to the ac­cu­ra­cy on con­trol­ling the beam pro­file, en­er­gy and flu­ence de­liv­ered onto the DUT (De­vice Under Test) sur­face, even with non rel­a­tivis­tic heavy ions. We have ex­posed dur­ing the same ses­sion, two beam cal­i­bra­tion sys­tems, the "Ref­er­ence SEU mon­i­tor" de­vel­oped by ESA/ESTEC and the beam mon­i­tor­ing and dosime­try setup de­vel­oped by our group. The re­sults are com­pared and dis­cussed here.

Slides

• T. Watanabe, N. Fukunishi, M. Kase, Y. Sasaki, Y. Yano
  RIKEN, Wako

A high­ly sen­si­tive beam cur­rent mon­i­tor with an HTS (High-Tem­per­a­ture Su­per­con­duct­ing) SQUID (Su­per­con­duct­ing QUan­tum In­ter­fer­ence De­vice) and an HTS cur­rent sen­sor, that is, an HTS SQUID mon­i­tor, has been de­vel­oped for use of the RIBF (RI beam fac­to­ry) at RIKEN. Un­like other ex­ist­ing fa­cil­i­ties, the HTS SQUID mon­i­tor al­lows us to mea­sure the DC of high-en­er­gy heavy-ion beams non­de­struc­tive­ly in real time, and the beam cur­rent ex­tract­ed from the cy­clotron can be record­ed with­out in­ter­rupt­ing the beam user's ex­per­i­ments. Both the HTS mag­net­ic shield and the HTS cur­rent sen­sor were dip-coat­ed to form a Bi₂ - Sr₂ - Ca₂ - Cu₃ - O_x (Bi-2223) layer on 99.9 % MgO ce­ram­ic sub­strates. In the pre­sent work, all the fab­ri­cat­ed HTS de­vices are cooled by a low-vi­bra­tion pulse-tube re­frig­er­a­tor. These tech­nolo­gies en­abled us to down­size the sys­tem. Prior to prac­ti­cal use at the RIBF, the HTS-SQUID mon­i­tor was in­stalled in the beam trans­port line of the RIKEN ring cy­clotron to demon­strate its per­for­mance. As a re­sult, a 20 μA ⁴⁰Ar¹⁵⁺ beam in­ten­si­ty (63 MeV/u) was suc­cess­ful­ly mea­sured with a 500 nA res­o­lu­tion. De­spite the per­for­mance tak­ing place in an en­vi­ron­ment with strong gamma ray and neu­tron flux ra­di­a­tions, RF back­ground and large stray mag­net­ic fields, the mea­sure­ments were suc­cess­ful­ly car­ried out in this study. This year, the HTS SQUID mon­i­tor was up­grad­ed to have ares­o­lu­tion of 100 nA and was re­in­stalled inthe beam trans­port line, en­abling us to mea­sure a 4 μA ¹³²Xe²⁰⁺ (10.8 MeV/u) beam and a 1 μA ¹³²Xe⁴¹⁺ (50.1 MeV/u) beam used for the ac­cel­er­a­tor op­er­a­tions at RIBF. Hence, we will re­port the re­sults of the beam mea­sure­ments an the pre­sent sta­tus of the HTS SQUID mon­i­tor.

Slides