Development of a front-end electronics for an innovative monitor chamber for high-intensity charged particle beams

A multi-gap ionization monitor chamber has been developed by INFN and Torino University, for monitoring of high intensity pulsed charged particle beams. The read-out of the chamber is based on a 64-channel ASIC, designed in CMOS 0.35μm technology which features for each channel an independent current-to-frequency converter followed by a synchronous counter. The chip was designed for connecting each channel to a different detector element. However, high beam intensities may lead to an input current above the saturation level of a single channel. A novel readout has been tested where all the input channels of the chip have been connected in parallel to the same detector element allowing to reach 64-times higher input current with only a modest deterioration of the resolution. Results will be presented in terms of linearity and noise, and will be compared to a simulation where the chip is modeled as a set of independent and uncorrelated channels

A simple method to increase the current range of the TERA chip in charged particle therapy applications

The development of the next generation of accelerators for charged particle radiotherapy aims to reduce dimensions and operational complexity of the machines by engineering pulsed beams accelerators. The drawback is the increased difficulty to monitor the beam delivery. Within each pulse, instantaneous currents larger by two to three orders of magnitude than present applications are expected, which would saturate the readout of the monitor chambers. In this paper, we report of a simple method to increase by almost two orders of magnitude the current range of an Application Specific Integrated Circuit chip previously developed by our group to read out monitor ionization chambers. & 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Coupling of Cyclotrons to Linacs for Medical Applications

Cyclotron and Linac technologies cover the vast majority of accelerator solutions applied to medicine. Cyclotrons with beams of H+/H-around 20 MeV are found for radioisotope production and cyclotrons with beams up to 250 MeV are widely used for protontherapy. Linacs are present in every medium-sized hospital with electron beams up to 20 MeV for radiotherapy and radioimaging. They have also recently become available as commercial products for protontherapy. The coupling of these two strong technologies enables to expand the capabilities of cyclotrons by using linacs as boosters. This opens the way to innovative accelerator systems allowing both radioisotope production and ion beam therapy (cyclinacs), new treatment techniques (high energy protontherapy) and new imaging techniques (proton radiography). This paper provides an overview of the technical challenges linked to coupling cyclotrons to linacs and the various solutions at hand