An electron microbeam cell-irradiation system at KIRAMS: Performance and preliminary experiments

An electron microbeam cell-irradiation (EMCI) system is now ready for routine operation in Korea. The system components include an electron gun operating at 1-100 keV, a beam transport chamber delivering a micron-sized beam, a cell image acquisition and positioning part and an automatic system control section. The present choice of source beam energy is 30 keV so that the radiation impact is conveyed to the targeted cells with a minimum spatial dispersion. The beam is available at 5 μm in diameter now, but can be changed in the range of 1-200 μm. The cellular dose is delivered with a standard deviation of 30% at 0.1 Gy, 10% at 1 Gy and 3% at 10 Gy. The cells are recognised by over 98% in a 1 mm x 1 mm area and the system is capable of irradiating up to 30,000 cells h-1. (authors)