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Design of 50 MeV proton microbeam based on cyclotron accelerator

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Abstract

High-energy proton microbeam facilities are powerful tools in space science, biology and cancer therapy studies. The primary limitations of the 50 MeV proton microbeam system are the poor beam quality provided by the cyclotron and the problem of intense scattering in the slit position. Here, we present an optical design for a cyclotron-based 50 MeV high-energy proton microbeam system with a micron-sized resolution. The microbeam system, which has an Oxford triplet lens configuration, has relatively small spherical aberrations and is insensitive to changes in the beam divergence angle and momentum spread. In addition, the energy filtration included in the system can reduce the beam momentum spread from 1 to 0.02%. The effects of lens parasitic aberrations and the lens fringe field on the beam spot resolution are also discussed. In addition, owing to the severe scattering of 50 MeV protons in slit materials, a slit system model based on the Geant4 toolkit enables the quantitative analysis of scattered protons and secondary particles. For the slit system settings under a 10-micron final beam spot, very few scattered protons can enter the quadrupole lens system and affect the focusing performance of the microbeam system, but the secondary radiation of neutrons and gamma rays generated at the collimation system should be considered for the 50 MeV proton microbeam. These data demonstrate that a 50 MeV proton microbeam system with a micron-sized beam spot based on a cyclotron is feasible.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Science Data Bank at https://doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.j00186.00078 and https://cstr.cn/31253.11.sciencedb.j00186.00078

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge G.W. Grime (University of Surrey) for technical communication and for providing the computer software WinTRAX, and François Méot (Brookhaven National Laboratory) and D. N. Jamieson (The University of Melbourne) for providing the computer software Zgoubi and PRAM, respectively.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Material Research Center, Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou, 730000, China

    Hong-Jin Mou, Guang-Bo Mao, Jin-Quan Zhang, Can Zhao, Jin-Long Guo, Wen-Jing Liu, Ru-Qun Wu, Cheng Shen, Lei Zhang & Guang-Hua Du

  2. School of Materials and Energy, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, 730000, China

    Hong-Jin Mou, Guang-Bo Mao & Jun-Shuai Li

  3. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Hong-Jin Mou, Guang-Bo Mao, Jin-Long Guo, Lei Zhang & Guang-Hua Du

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  1. Hong-Jin Mou
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Hong-Jin Mou, Guang-Bo Mao and Guang-Hua Du. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Hong-Jin Mou and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Guang-Hua Du.

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The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Additional information

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 1197283 and U1632271) and the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2021YFA1601400).

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Mou, HJ., Mao, GB., Zhang, JQ. et al. Design of 50 MeV proton microbeam based on cyclotron accelerator. NUCL SCI TECH 34, 92 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41365-023-01235-x

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