Carbon Ion Injection System for a Complex of Radiation Therapy

A project to create a complex of radiation therapy with a beam of carbon ions for the purpose of creating technology for the treatment of radioresistant oncological neoplasms is being considered at the site of the National Research Center Kurchatov Institute, Institute of High Energy Physics, in Protvino [1, 2]. The accelerator complex will consist of the following main parts: laser ion source, matching channel, linear accelerator, ion synchrotron. The linear accelerator must provide at the output a pulse current of accelerated C⁺⁴ ions of at least 1 mA. The radio-frequency quadruple (RFQ) is supposed to be used as the first section of the linear accelerator. Modeling of the injection system for a linear accelerator includes calculations of the ion extraction system, the matching channel, and the beam dynamics in RFQ to assess the quality of the beam at the RFQ output. As a result of the calculations, a C⁺⁴ carbon ion beam injection system has been developed that increases the beam emittance in the matching channel of no more than 30% and makes possible the diagnostics and correction of the beam up to RFQ and the almost complete capture of the beam in the accelerating system.