Development of the RF cavity for the SKKUCY-9 compact cyclotron

Abstract

A 9MeV compact cyclotron, named SKKUCY-9, for a radiopharmaceutical compound especially fludeoxyglucose (FDG) production for a positron emission tomography (PET) machine was developed at Sungkyunkwan University. H− ions which are produced from a Penning Ionization Gauge(PIG) ion source, travel through a normal conducting radio frequency (RF) cavity which operates at 83.2MHz for an acceleration and electro-magnet for a beam focusing until the ions acquire energy of about 9MeV. For installation at a small local hospital, our SKKUCY-9 cyclotron is developed to be compact and light-weight, comparable to conventional medical purpose cyclotrons. For compactness, we adapted a deep valley and large angle hill type for the electro-magnet design. Normally a RF cavity is installed inside of the empty space of the magnet valley region, which is extremely small in our case. We faced problems such as difficulties of installing the RF cavity, low Q-value. Despite of those difficulties, a compact RF cavity and its system including a RF power coupler to feed amplified RF power to the RF cavity and a fine tuner to compensate RF frequency variations was successfully developed and tested.