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The advance in laser-driven accelerators is progressively allowing to consider these sources for many different applications. Indeed, relatively compact laser systems can deliver few joules on target reaching intensities of 1019 Wcm-2. Such lasers are present in many facilities and are nowadays available as standard products for purchase. The capability of exploiting these sources would thus be beneficial also in terms of larger availability for users willing to leverage proton irradiation.
In this regime, the Target Normal Sheath acceleration (TNSA) is routinely triggered and provides few MeV of protons in short bunches, delivering high dose per shot. Nevertheless, the accelerated proton beam is typically characterized by a divergence of 15° half-angle. Thus, for its effective employment, it is necessary to implement a magnetic transport line to transfer the protons from the TNSA source to the irradiation site. This issue has been faced by many groups and a cost-effective, compact magnetic beamline (hereinafter MBL) has been proposed in a previous work to sensibly enhance the proton flux on secondary targets for protons energy up to 10 MeV.
Geant4 simulations were carried out to assess the feasibility of using an upgraded version of the mentioned MBL to employ laser-driven accelerator as proton source for in-air irradiation of secondary targets. The great versatility of this approach allows to explore multiple irradiation schemes that can be involved in different applications such as Ion Beam Analysis (in particular here we refer to PIXE and XRF) and radioisotope production for PET scan. The outcomes of the simulations were used for the preparation of two dedicated experimental campaigns on the two thematics. Here we present the obtained results and compare them with simulation.
The main achievements are then discussed taking as reference the performance of the currently adopted methodologies, reporting on the main advantages and limits of laser-driven sources with respect to conventional one.
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