Speaker
Description
Laser-driven ion accelerators (LDIAs) generate high-intensity beams, offering immense potential across various applications, including investigating ultra-high dose rate radiobiological research. The significant beam divergence of laser-driven proton beams at the source requires capture and transport of these beams to maintain a high particle intensity at the sample site located outside the main target chamber. At the BELLA Center's iP2 beamline, we have deployed two beam transport configurations, leveraging permanent magnets for compactness, to reliably deliver up to 30 MeV protons to biological samples at high particle intensities. In conjunction with these setups, a comprehensive suite of diagnostic tools was implemented for dosimetry tasks, including multiple integrating current transformers (ICTs) for indirect online dose measurements and calibrated radiochromic films (RCFs) to measure the dose distribution and calibrate the ICTs. With the use of Monte Carlo simulations of the beamline, we achieve accurate dose estimates applied to the samples, while accounting for the linear energy transfer (LET)-dependent response of RCFs. The proton beam transport was successfully used for in vivo biological sample irradiations and is available to future users of BELLA iP2.
Work was supported by the U.S. DOE Office of Science, Offices of FES and HEP under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231, and by LaserNetUS. S. Hakimi was supported by the U.S. DOE FES Postdoctoral Research Program administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) under Contract No. DE-SC0014664. B. Stassel was supported by the U.S. DOE, Office of WDTS, Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program under Contract No. DE‐SC0014664.
| Working group | WG2 : Laser-driven plasma acceleration of ions |
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