Superconductivity and other new Developments in Gantry Design for Particle Therapy

Particle therapy has significantly gained importance in treating tumors over the last years. The gantry is the part of the irradiation facility which allows conformal irradiation with different field angles and has similar complexity as the rest of the accelerator. There is ongoing effort to reduce size and complexity of such gantries while maintaining or even increasing treatment quality aiming at more cost-efficient solutions. One of the promising approaches is to use superconducting (SC) magnets for the gantries which could offer new opportunities but also will bring new challenges.

The scope of this workshop is to bring together experts from different fields like magnet engineers, medical physicists as well as representative from industry to discuss and review the current status, the requirement and the technical challenges. The workshop should foster interactions amongst people in various labs, institutions and industry. The meeting will be composed of oral contributions from different institutes but we have foreseen enough time for discussion. The workshop will address the following topics:

• Status and requirements of particle gantries for medical application
• Magnet geometries and superconducting cables for future gantries
• Mechanical and thermal stability of SC magnets
• Options and challenges for different SC material
• Beam optics requirements and possibilities with SC gantries
• Future direction and upcoming challenges in gantry development
• Implications of SC magnets on (clinical) operation
   

This workshop will be held in the Park-Hotel, Bad Zurzach (close to the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI)) and on one day at PSI, where a visit will be organized to the PSI's gantries. It is supported by the Enhanced European Coordination for Accelerator Research and Development (EuCard2) and is organized in the framework of work package 4 (Accelerator Applications).