ELIMED, MEDical and multidisciplinary applications at ELI-Beamlines

Abstract

ELI-Beamlines is one of the pillars of the pan-European project ELI (Extreme Light Infrastructure). It will be an ultra high-intensity, high repetition-rate, femtosecond laser facility whose main goal is generation and applications of high-brightness X-ray sources and accelerated charged particles in different fields. Particular care will be devoted to the potential applicability of laser-driven ion beams for medical treatments of tumors. Indeed, such kind of beams show very interesting peculiarities and, moreover, laser-driven based accelerators can really represent a competitive alternative to conventional machines since they are expected to be more compact in size and less expensive. The ELIMED project was launched thanks to a collaboration established between FZU-ASCR (ELI-Beamlines) and INFN-LNS researchers. Several European institutes have already shown a great interest in the project aiming to explore the possibility to use laser-driven ion (mostly proton) beams for several applications with a particular regard for medical ones. To reach the project goal several tasks need to be fulfilled, starting from the optimization of laser-target interaction to dosimetric studies at the irradiation point at the end of a proper designed transport beam-line. Researchers from LNS have already developed and successfully tested a high-dispersive power Thomson Parabola Spectrometer, which is the first prototype of a more performing device to be used within the ELIMED project. Also a Magnetic Selection System able to produce a small pencil beam out of a wide energy distribution of ions produced in laser-target interaction has been realized and some preliminary work for its testing and characterization is in progress. In this contribution the status of the project will be reported together with a short description of the of the features of device recently developed.