22 lines
3.6 KiB
Text
22 lines
3.6 KiB
Text
Particle accelerators nowadays play a vital role in a multitude of scientific fields as, for example in the field of accelerator-based radiotherapy.
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Both fields have become highly complex over time and new developments are continuously pushing the understanding and the technological limits towards increasingly extreme beam properties.
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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.
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In radiotherapy (RT), the current development of two advanced approaches pushes in the same direction of high intensity beams with temporal or spatial structuring.
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FLASH RT is based on the delivery of very high doses in short pulses and Microbeam RT focuses on spatially fractionated beams.
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In both methods, a significant widening of the therapeutic window is observed.
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The resulting normal tissue sparing effect is expected to improve treatment outcomes and reduce overall toxicity for the patients resulting in a better quality of life after treatment.
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At the same time, the used beam properties go beyond the prediction and diagnostic capabilities in conventional RT.
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One difficulty is the increasing non-linearity in the response of usual dosimetry methods at high dose-rates.
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Furthermore, increased requirements on dosimetry and time-resolved diagnostics as well as on simulations of the beam dynamics not only in the accelerators during generation but also for beam-matter interactions on the way to the target, open up new challenges and require 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 deep understanding of involved dynamics for such extreme beam conditions and the required diagnostics thereof is an active research topic in/of?? accelerator physics and has been the main focus of my research in the last years.
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The strong effects caused by the coexistence of a high number of charged particles in the densely populated pulses are summarized under the term collective effects and describe the self-interaction within the beam as well as the interaction with the environment, both of which, dependent on the detailed particle distribution.
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The proposed project therefore aims at improving the understanding, predictability and control of the accelerator-based electron beams involved in electron FLASH and Microbeam RT.
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The entry point will be to extend (my previous?/ 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 up to the target tissue, investigating the influence of collective effects during the transport which up until now was sparsely studied. Based on these studies, the effective relation of input particle distribution to the dose distribution on target will be explored. This enables the attempt to solve the inverse problem, i.e. determining the required input distribution for a desired dose distribution on target. First tests of targeted beam shaping will be a part of this project. With this kind of control, 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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%Improved insight into the influence of temporal or spatial pulse modulation on detection and diagnostics to provide recommendations for applicable methods depending on beam parameters
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