Design study of a superconducting gantry for carbon beam therapy

Abstract

This paper describes beam-optics design of a gantry for carbon ions in cancer therapy accelerators. A compact design is important for such a gantry. The designed gantry is compact such that its size is comparable to the size of the existing proton gantries. This is made possible by introducing superconducting double helical coils for dipole magnets. The gantry optics is designed in such a way that it provides rotation-invariant optics, a variable beam size, and point-to-parallel scanning of a beam. For large-aperture magnet, a three-dimensional magnetic field distribution is obtained by invoking a computer code, and a number of particles are tracked by integrating equations of motion numerically together with a three-dimensional interpolation. The beam-shape distortion due to the fringe field is reduced to an acceptable level by optimizing the coil windings with the help of a genetic algorithm. Higher-order transfer coefficients are calculated and shown to be reduced greatly with appropriate optimization of the coil windings.