Speaker
Description
In charged particle therapy, high energy layer switching times prolong beam delivery time, limiting treatment efficiency. The TURBO (Technology for Ultra-Rapid Beam Operation) project aims to build a low-energy (0.5-3 MeV) demonstrator beamline for proton therapy with a large momentum acceptance (±42%), enabling rapid delivery over the full clinical energy range, alleviating this bottleneck. Novel beam diagnostic instrumentation is required to monitor key parameters of the beam sourced from the University of Melbourne’s Pelletron accelerator, which operates at low energies and high current densities. We develop a pepper-pot mask-based method to measure beam phase space distribution and quantify the emittance, an innovative multi-layer Faraday cup (MLFC) adapted to measure energy distribution at low-MeV, and a low-energy degrader design to systematically vary the incident beam energy. This work now enables the completion of the beam shaping section, and integration of a fixed-field, closed-dispersion beam transport section, key next steps toward assessing TURBO’s potential to shorten beam delivery times.