Abstract
Charged particle acceleration using ultra-intense and ultra-short laser pulses has gathered a strong interest in the scientific community and it is now one of the most attractive topics in the relativistic laser-plasma interaction research. Indeed, it could represent the future of particle acceleration and open new scenarios in multidisciplinary fields, in particular, medical applications. One of the biggest challenges consists of using, in a future perspective, high intensity laser-target interaction to generate high-energy ions for therapeutic purposes, eventually replacing the old paradigm of acceleration, characterized by huge and complex machines. The peculiarities of laser-driven beams led to develop new strategies and advanced techniques for transport, diagnostics and dosimetry of the accelerated particles, due to the wide energy spread, the angular divergence and the extremely intense pulses. In this framework, the realization of the ELIMED (ELI-Beamlines MEDical applications) beamline, developed by INFN-LNS (Catania, Italy) and 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 in multidisciplinary applications. ELIMED will represent the first user’s open transport beam line where a controlled laser-driven ion beam will be used for multidisciplinary and medical studies. In this paper, an overview of the beamline, with a detailed description of the main transport elements, will be presented. Moreover, a description of the detectors dedicated to diagnostics and dosimetry will be reported, with some preliminary results obtained both with accelerator-driven and laser-driven beams.
Highlights
The concept of coherent acceleration, that can be advised as the starting idea of the new particle acceleration approach, based on the high-intensity laser matter interaction, was introduced for the first time in 1957 by Veksler [1]
Beam line, which will be developed by LNS-INFN, will represent the section of the ELIMAIA activity addressed to the transport, handling and dosimetry of the laser-driven ion beams allowing the achievement of stable, controlled and reproducible beams that, in the future, will be available for all the users interested in multidisciplinary and medical applications of such innovative technology
In this paper an overview of the ELIMED beam line section, that will be installed at the ELI-Beamlines facility in Prague, has been presented
Summary
The concept of coherent acceleration, that can be advised as the starting idea of the new particle acceleration approach, based on the high-intensity laser matter interaction, was introduced for the first time in 1957 by Veksler [1]. A very high peak current, a broad energy spectrum, a wide angular distribution and a rather small transverse and longitudinal emittance are the main features of a typical laser-driven ion beam generated in the so-called TNSA (Target Normal Sheath Acceleration) acceleration regime, which represents the most known and experimentally investigated laser-induced acceleration process. In this framework, a collaboration between the INFN-LNS (Nuclear Physics Laboratory, Catania, Italy) and the ASCR-FZU (Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Science), in charge for the ELI-Beamlines facility implementation, has been established in 2012. The ELIMED beam line, which will be developed by LNS-INFN, will represent the section of the ELIMAIA activity addressed to the transport, handling and dosimetry of the laser-driven ion beams allowing the achievement of stable, controlled and reproducible beams that, in the future, will be available for all the users interested in multidisciplinary and medical applications of such innovative technology
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