Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
INFN/LNF, Frascati, Italy
INFN/LNS, Catania, Italy
Institut Curie - Centre de Protonthérapie d’Orsay, Orsay, France
The Flash Radio Therapy is a revolutionary new technique in the cancer cure: it spares healthy tissue from the damage of the ionizing radiation maintaining the tumor control as efficient as in conventional radiotherapy. To allow the implementation of the FLASH Therapy concept into actual clinical use, it is necessary to have a linear accelerator able to deliver the very high dose and very high dose rate (>106 Gy/s) in a very short irradiation time (beam on time < 100ms). Low energy S-band Linacs (up to 7 MeV) are being used in Radiobiology and pre-clinic applications but in order to treat deep tumors, the energy of the electrons should achieve the range of 60-100 MeV. In this paper, we address the main issues in the design of a compact C band (5.712 GHz) electron linac-VHEE for FLASH Radio Therapy. We present preliminary studies on C-band structures at La Sapienza and at INFN-LNS, aiming to reach a high accelerating gradient and high current necessary to deliver a dose >1 Gy/pulse, with very short electron pulse.
