Ponente
Descripción
Laser-plasma accelerators have attracted significant interest, particularly thanks to the extreme accelerating fields in the plasma, offering a cost-effective and compact alternative to traditional accelerators. Significant progress has been made in recent years in laser-driven ion acceleration, including acceleration of protons with unprecedented properties, such as ultra-short duration, low emittance and high brightness, reaching energies in excess of 100 MeV. Furthermore, the ongoing progress has opened up the possibility of using these beams in proof-of-principle applications in a wide range of fields, particularly in those related to medical uses, such as production of nuclear activation of materials for medical imaging and therapy, or proton-based ultra-high-dose-rate radiation therapy.
Here, an overview of recent progress on laser-driven ion acceleration will be presented, particularly on the efforts to increase the energy, flux, and repetition rate at which these sources can be operated. Results on the use of these ion beams in medicine will be presented. The generation of pre-clinical and clinical levels of carbon-11 useful for positron-emission-tomography (PET) imaging will be discussed, including our latest measurements using a petawatt-class facility. Furthermore, recent studies reported of the use of laser-accelerated proton beams for radiation therapy with dose rates in excess of giga-Gray per second will be introduced, including in-vitro and in-vivo experiments. Ongoing efforts to perform these experiments at national facilities such as L2A2 (Santiago de Compostela) or CLPU (Salamanca) will be examined [see M. Seimetz contribution for latest results].
