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The main direction proposed by the community of experts in the field of laser-driven ion acceleration is to improve particle beam features (maximum energy, charge, emittance, divergence, monochromaticity, shot-to-shot stability) in order to demonstrate reliable and compact approaches to be used for multidisciplinary applications, thus, in principle, reducing the overall cost of a laser-based facility compared to a conventional accelerator one and, at the same time, demonstrating innovative and more effective sample irradiation geometries.
The mission of the laser-driven ion target area at ELI-Beamlines (Extreme Light Infrastructure) in Dolní Břežany, Czech Republic, called ELI Multidisciplinary Applications of laser-Ion Acceleration (ELIMAIA) [1], is to provide stable, fully characterized and tunable beams of particles accelerated by Petawatt-class lasers and to offer them to the user community for multidisciplinary applications. The ELIMAIA beamline has been designed and developed at the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Science of the Czech Republic (IoP-ASCR) in Prague and at the National Laboratories of Southern Italy of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (LNS-INFN) in Catania (Italy). The key section of the beamline, which includes the beam focusing, the energy selection, the beam transport, the dosimetric and sample irradiation elements, is called ELIMED (ELI MEDical and multidisciplinary applications) [2] portion.
At ELIMED, controlled proton and light ion (included carbon) beams up to 300 MeV and 70 AMeV, respectively, can be transported down to the in-air section where absolute dosimetry can be carried out with dose-rate independent devices. A transmission, dual-gap air ionisation chamber provides an on-line measurement of the ion beam dose at the irradiation point, simultaneously allowing for corrections related to ion recombination effects. The maximum expected uncertainty in the final dose released into the user sample is less then 5%.
The ELIMED pilot experiment on sample irradiation with laser-accelerated protons is scheduled in 2021. A radiobiological campaign for in-vitro irradiation is planned. In this presentation the status of the ELIMED-ELIMAIA beamline will be reported along with a complete description of its dosimetry systems and their preliminary calibration. The expected final beam characteristics, in terms of dose per pulse, dose-rate and beam spot size (numerically calculated by Monte Carlo simulations) will also be reported. Moreover, an innovative detector based on Silicon Carbide technology capable to reconstruct proton range, energy spectrum, and online released dose will be also discussed.
[1] D. Margarone, G.A.P.Cirrone et al., “ELIMAIA: A Laser-Driven Ion Accelerator for Multidisciplinary Applications”, Quantum Beam. Sci., 2, 8 (2018)
[2] G.A.P Cirrone, M. Carpinelli et al., “ELIMED, future hadrontherapy applications of laser-accelerated beams”, Nucl. Inst. Meth. 730:174–177 (2013)
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