Proton accelerators are in significant demand due to their widespread societal applications, for instance clinical cancer therapy, as the protons target deep-seated tumours with negligible damage to the surrounding healthy tissues. High capital and operational costs associated with the conventional accelerators make proton therapy poorly accessible, which has triggered the interest in the search for affordable alternatives. In this context, proton acceleration employing high power lasers has recently emerged as a promising alternative to the conventional techniques. In addition to their compactness and cost-effectiveness, the laser-driven sources deliver high doses in an extremely short-time period (one billionth of the second), offering a unique prospective for radiobiological studies. The key challenge, however, is to overcome broad energy spread and large divergence of the laser-driven proton beams. This project aims to control these shortcomings by employing a novel target arrangement at a PW class laser, which can effectively tailor the spatial and spectral profile of the beam at the source, importantly at high repetition rate (1 Hz). Transporting the beams to large distances away from the laser interaction region will be demonstrated by using a system of magnets, as a step towards building dedicated beamlines for multidisciplinary applications. The high-quality proton beams with energies required for therapeutic applications ( > 50MeV) will be deployed, for the first time, in-vitro radiobiological studies on cancer breast cells at a dose rate of ~ 100 Gy/min. The timeliness of the project is underpinned by the on-going developments of high-power laser facilities globally, e.g. three pillars of pan-European Extreme Light Infrastructure, Apollon (France), EPAC (UK) and ZEUS (USA). Notably, this cutting-edge research would reinforce Europe's leading role in the development of 'all-optical' accelerators and position me at the forefront of this emerging field.
This project is financed by EU.
