Normal-conducting scaling fixed field alternating gradient accelerator for proton therapy

In this paper we present a new lattice design for a 30–350 MeV scaling fixed-field alternating gradient accelerator for proton therapy and tomography—NORMA (NOrmal-conducting Racetrack Medical Accelerator). The energy range allows the realization of proton computed tomography and utilizes normal con...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: J. M. Garland, R. B. Appleby, H. Owen, S. Tygier
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: American Physical Society 2015-09-01
Series:Physical Review Special Topics. Accelerators and Beams
Online Access:http://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTAB.18.094701
Description
Summary:In this paper we present a new lattice design for a 30–350 MeV scaling fixed-field alternating gradient accelerator for proton therapy and tomography—NORMA (NOrmal-conducting Racetrack Medical Accelerator). The energy range allows the realization of proton computed tomography and utilizes normal conducting magnets in both a conventional circular ring option and a novel racetrack configuration, both designed using advanced optimization algorithms we have developed in pyzgoubi. Both configurations consist of ten focusing-defocusing-focusing triplet cells and operate in the second stability region of Hills equation. The ring configuration has a circumference of 60 m, a peak magnetic field seen by the beam of <1.6  T, a maximum horizontal orbit excursion of 44 cm and a dynamic aperture of 68 mm mrad—determined using a novel dynamic aperture (DA) calculation technique. The racetrack alternative is realized by adding magnet-free drift space in between cells at two opposing points in the ring, to facilitate injection and extraction. Our racetrack design has a total magnet-free straight lengths of 4.9 m, a circumference of 71 m, a peak magnetic field seen by the beam of <1.74  T, a maximum horizontal orbit excursion of 50 cm and a DA of 58 mm mrad. A transverse magnet misalignment model is also presented for the ring and racetrack configurations where the DA remains above 40 mm mrad for randomly misaligned error distributions with a standard deviation up to 100  μm.
ISSN:1098-4402