A Review of Nonscaling CW FFAs for Proton and Ion Therapy Applications

Significant progress on compact, variable-energy versions of non-scaling fixed field accelerators with alternating strong-focusing gradients (nsFFA) has been made and adapted to proton and ion therapy. Not only has isochronous (CW) capability been demonstrated in a realizable design, an isochronous racetrack format has evolved which supports lengthy, synchrotron-like straight sections. Long straight insertions promote low-loss injection and extraction systems and further facilitate extracting lower-energy orbits using a bipolar bump-magnet system. To efficiently extract variable energy using this method, the accelerator complex requires separated accelerator stages, each stage with limited but therapeutically optimized energy ranges targeting specific cancer types and penetration depths. Different energy stages further support multiple treatment rooms increasing patient throughput and reducing treatment cost. The staged system proposed here also realizes cost savings in gantries by tailoring delivery to different therapeutic energies and beam requirements, promoting the requirement for only one high-energy gantry in the facility. The proposed facility consists of 3 stages, a 30 MeV injector, a 30 - 90 MeV/nucleon FFA for shallow cancers, and 90 - 250/330 MeV/nucleon stage for deep tumors, pelvis for example. The higher energy of the final stage, 330 MeV/nucleon is preferred to support Proton Computed Tomography. Isochronous FFA stages can be designed to accelerate either protons or ions with charge to mass of 1/2.