Focused beam dosimetry of short VHEE bunches

Brunetti, Enrico and Maitrallain, Antoine and Jaroszynski, Dino A.; Jaroszynski, Dino A. and Hur, MinSup, eds. (2021) Focused beam dosimetry of short VHEE bunches. In: Relativistic Plasma Waves and Particle Beams as Coherent and Incoherent Radiation Sources IV. Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering . SPIE, Washington, USA. ISBN 9781510643918 (https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2595299)

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Abstract

Accelerators driven by 10s TW-class lasers can produce electron bunches with femtosecond-scale duration and energy of 100s of MeV. A potential application of such short bunches is high-dose rate radiotherapy, which could transition to FLASH radiotherapy if a sufficiently large dose is delivered in a single shot. Here we present Monte Carlo simulations to study the bunch length evolution of an electron beam propagating in a water phantom. We show that for electron energies above 100 MeV the bunch lengthens to 1--10 ps duration after interaction with a 30 cm long water phantom, both for a collimated and weakly focused geometry. The corresponding dose rates are on the order of 200 Gy/s per primary electron, much higher than in conventional radiotherapy.