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CERN, home of the 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is developing a new particle accelerator just two metres long.
The miniature linear accelerator (mini-Linac) is designed for use in hospitals for imaging and the treatment of cancer. It will consist of four modules, each 50cm long, the first of which has already been constructed. "With this first module we have validated all of the stages of construction and the concept in general", says Serge Mathot of the CERN engineering department.
Designing an accelerator for medical purposes presented a new technological challenge for the CERN team. "We knew the technology was within our reach after all those years we had spent developing Linac4," says Maurizio Vretenar, coordinator of the mini-Linac project. Linac4, a larger accelerator designed to boost negative hydrogen ions to high energies, is scheduled to be connected to the CERN accelerator complex in 2020.
The miniature accelerator is a radiofrequency quadrupole (RFQ), a component found at the start of all proton accelerator chains. RFQs are designed to produce high-intensity beams. The challenge for the mini-Linac was to double the operating frequency of the RFQ in order to shorten its length. This desired high frequency had never before been achieved. "Thanks to new beam dynamics and innovative ideas for the radiofrequency and mechanical aspects, we came up with an accelerator design that was much better adapted to the practical requirements of medical applications," says Alessandra Lombardi, in charge of the design of the RFQ.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Thursday July 30 2015, @07:39AM
It is an isotope production machine, so the idea is to fire low energy protons onto a target to produce radioisotopes. The radioisotopes are then injected into patients and the resultant decay particles (probably gammas) are monitored in order to image blood flow and so forth. Another interesting idea for radioisotopes is to inject an unstable alpha emitter onto a cancer site, in order to kill cancer cells in the vicinity of the tumour.
It is *not* a hadron/proton therapy machine. So the idea is not to bombard a cancer site with protons to kill the cells in the vicinity of the tumour. As others have commented, that is order 100 M$ facility, typically requiring few 100 MeV cyclotron.
Note I am not a medic, I am a physicist, and I don't work on these sorts of things, so I may have got the medical stuff wrong.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday July 30 2015, @07:50AM
In fact, reading again, it looks like it is an injector for a radioisotope cyclotron which has yet to be designed. The article is a bit hazy on details.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @04:28AM
This link: http://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2015/26/?ln=en [cds.cern.ch] seems to say that they do intend the design to be used for hadron therapy as well: