The transmission of protons in planar channeling or in the regime of crystal reflection in bent crystals is now routinely used at high energy. We used the property that channeling critical angle ...increases as the incident particle momentum decreases, to explore the region of moderate energies (100MeV–1GeV). Indeed, such energies are particularly interesting since medical applications such as particle therapy have to face the constraints of being compatible with hospital-based accelerators. Therefore, replacing tens- or even hundreds-tons gantries by bent crystals would – if feasible – meet societal applications.
We used binary-encounter simulations of trajectories inside crystals oriented along planar directions. The Molière potential with thermally vibrating lattice atoms was used, and additional transverse heating was introduced to account for multiple elastic scattering by close-collisions on electrons, which depends on the transverse energy of the channeled ions.
The survival yield (i.e. the fraction of ions keeping trajectories within plus-minus one critical planar channeling angle with respect to lattice planes) was simulated for protons and carbon ions, as a function of crystal nature (silicon or germanium), crystal temperature, thickness and curvature.
Although the transmitted yields are far from the necessary yields required to treat patients, significant survival yields were found through cm-thick crystals at angles beyond 10°.
We will discuss possible experimental verification of these findings, and in particular practical aspects of such very large bending angles.
A horizontal beam facility for radiobiological experiments with low-energy protons has been set up at the 4MV Van de Graaff accelerator of the Institut de Physique Nucléaire de Lyon. A homogeneous ...irradiation field with a suitable proton flux is obtained by means of two collimators and two Au-scattering foils. A monitoring chamber contains a movable Faraday cup, a movable quartz beam viewer for controlling the intensity and the position of the initial incident beam and four scintillating fibers for beam monitoring during the irradiation of the cell samples. The beam line is ended by a thin aluminized Mylar window (12μm thick) for the beam extraction in air. The set-up was simulated by the GATE v6.1 Monte-Carlo platform. The measurement of the proton energy distribution, the evaluation of the fluence-homogeneity over the sample and the calibration of the monitoring system were performed using a silicon PIPS detector, placed in air in the same position as the biological samples to be irradiated. The irradiation proton fluence was found to be homogeneous to within ±2% over a circular field of 20mm diameter. As preliminary biological experiment, two Human Head and Neck Squamous Carcinoma Cell lines (with different radiosensitivities) were irradiated with 2.9MeV protons. The measured survival curves are compared to those obtained after X-ray irradiation, giving a Relative Biological Efficiency between 1.3 and 1.4.
This paper gives a short review of the past and recent activities of the Atomic Collisions in Solids Lyon-group, in collaboration with other groups, in the field of high energy channelling. The ...ion-channelling programme was performed at GANIL-Caen and at GSI-Darmstadt. The electron-channelling programme started at ALS-Saclay for relativistic incident energies and was then extended to SPS-CERN for ultra-relativistic energies. The last part of this paper presents the electron-channelling experiments performed originally at ALS-Saclay, then at BTF-Frascati and more recently at LS-Saga, in order to observe the electron “internal clock” predicted in 1924 by L. de Broglie.
The goal of this study is to tune the design of the absorber detector of a Compton camera for prompt γ-ray imaging during ion beam therapy. The response of the Compton camera to a photon point source ...with a realistic energy spectrum (corresponding to the prompt γ-ray spectrum emitted during the carbon irradiation of a water phantom) is studied by means of Geant4 simulations. Our Compton camera consists of a stack of 2 mm thick silicon strip detectors as a scatter detector and of a scintillator plate as an absorber detector. Four scintillators are considered: LYSO, NaI, LaBr 3 and BGO. LYSO and BGO appear as the most suitable materials, due to their high photo-electric cross-sections, which leads to a high percentage of fully absorbed photons. Depth-of-interaction measurements are shown to have limited influence on the spatial resolution of the camera. In our case, the thickness which gives the best compromise between a high percentage of photons that are fully absorbed and a low parallax error is about 4 cm for the LYSO detector and 4.5 cm for the BGO detector. The influence of the width of the absorber detector on the spatial resolution is not very pronounced as long as it is lower than 30 cm.
Experimental fission studies for reaction physics or nuclear spectroscopy can profit from fast, efficient, and radiation-resistant fission fragment (FF) detectors. When such experiments are performed ...in-beam in intense thermal neutron beams, additional constraints arise in terms of target-detector interface, beam-induced background, etc. Therefore, wide gap semi-conductor detectors were tested with the aim of developing innovative instrumentation for such applications. The detector characterization was performed with mass- and energy-separated fission fragment beams at the ILL (Institut Laue Langevin) LOHENGRIN spectrometer. Two single crystal diamonds, three polycrystalline and one diamond-on-iridium as well as a silicon carbide detector were characterized as solid state ionization chamber for FF detection. Timing measurements were performed with a 500-µm thick single crystal diamond detector read out by a broadband amplifier. A timing resolution of ∼10.2 ps RMS was obtained for FF with mass A = 98 at 90 MeV kinetic energy. Using a spectroscopic preamplifier developed at INFN-Milano, the energy resolution measured for the same FF was found to be slightly better for a ∼50-µm thin single crystal diamond detector (∼1.4% RMS) than for the 500-µm thick one (∼1.6% RMS), while a value of 3.4% RMS was obtained with the 400-µm silicon carbide detector. The Pulse Height Defect (PHD), which is significant in silicon detectors, was also investigated with the two single crystal diamond detectors. The comparison with results from α and triton measurements enabled us to conclude that PHD leads to ∼50% loss of the initial generated charge carriers for FF. In view of these results, a possible detector configuration and integration for in-beam experiments has been discussed.
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