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3.5 KiB
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4 lines
3.5 KiB
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Particle accelerators nowadays play a vital role in a multitude of scientific fields. They have become highly complex over time and with them the field of accelerator physics. New developments are continuously pushing the understanding and the technological limits towards increasingly extreme beam properties. In electron accelerators, this includes ultra-short pulses at high intensities in linear accelerators or free electron lasers as well as transversely narrow pulses for ultra-low emittance synchrotron light sources. The extensive research conducted today aims for a deep understanding of the involved beam dynamics occurring in these extreme beam conditions as well as of the diagnostics thereof. The extreme conditions lead to strong effects caused by the coexistence of many particles in the densely populated pulses. These effects are summarized under the term collective effects. They describe self-interaction of particles within the beam as well as the interaction with the environment, both of which are dependent on the actual particle distribution. The study of collective effects is an active research topic and has been the main focus of my research in the last years.
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At the same time, the current development of two advanced approaches in accelerator-based radiotherapy (RT) pushes in the same direction of high intensity beams with temporal or spatial structuring. FLASH RT is based on the delivery of very high doses in short pulses and Microbeam RT focuses on spatially fractionated beams. In both methods a significant widening of the therapeutic window is observed. The resulting observed normal tissue sparing effect is expected to improve treatment outcomes and reduce overall toxicity for the patients resulting in a better quality of life. The beam properties used for FLASH and Microbeam RT go beyond the prediction and diagnostic capabilities in conventional RT. One mayor difficulty is the increasing non-linearity in the response of usual dosimetry methods at high dose-rates. The increased requirements on dosimetry as well as on the overall diagnostics and simulation of the beam dynamics in the accelerators used for beam generation open up new challenges and possibilities. These extreme beam properties in the novel radiotherapy methods pose a great opportunity to push the understanding of the involved complex beam dynamics and collective effects in this active and exiting research field.
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The proposed project aims at improving the understanding, predictability and control of the accelerator-based particle beams involved in FLASH and Microbeam RT. The entry point will be to extend the research on collective effects in accelerators to cover the beam properties required for FLASH and Microbeam RT, profiting from my expertise in this field. Subsequently, this project will expand the study beyond the particle accelerator into the beam-matter interaction. The influence of collective effects during the transport from the accelerator through matter onto the target, which up until now was sparsely studied, will be explored in detail. Based on these studies the connection from input particle distribution to the dose distribution on target will be explored. Investigating the inverse problem, i.e. determining the required input distribution for a desired dose distribution on target, will allow first tests of targeted beam shaping within this project. The outcome of the project will be a significant contribution to FLASH and Microbeam RT as well as to the general advancement of accelerator physics.
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