Advanced medical accelerator design

This report describes the design of an advanced medical facility dedicated to charged particle radiotherapy and other biomedical applications of relativistic heavy ions. Project status is reviewed and some technical aspects discussed. Clinical standards of reliability are regarded as essential features of this facility. Particular emphasis is therefore placed on the control system and on the use of technology which will maximize operational efficiency. The accelerator will produce a variety of heavy ion beams from helium to argon with intensities sufficient to provide delivered dose rates of several hundred rad/minute over large, uniform fields. The technical components consist of a linac injector with multiple PIG ion sources, a synchrotron and a versatile beam delivery system. An overview is given of both design philosophy and selected accelerator subsystems. Finally, a plan of the facility is described

Thermal rates for baryon and anti-baryon production

We use a form of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem to derive formulas giving the rate of production of spin-1/2 baryons in terms of the fluctuations of either meson or quark fields. The most general formulas do not assume thermal or chemical equilibrium. When evaluated in a thermal ensemble we find equilibration times on the order of 10 fm/c near the critical temperature in QCD.Comment: 22 pages, 4 tables and 2 figures, REVTe

Slow Molecules Produced by Photodissociation

A simple method to control molecular translation with a chemical reaction is demonstrated. Slow NO molecules have been produced by partially canceling the molecular beam velocity of NO$_2$ with the recoil velocity of the NO photofragment. The NO$_2$ molecules were photodissociated using a UV laser pulse polarized parallel to the molecular beam. The spatial profiles of NO molecules showed two peaks corresponding to decelerated and accelerated molecules, in agreement with theoretical prediction. A significant portion of the decelerated NO molecules stayed around the initial dissociation positions even several hundred nanoseconds after their production.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure