Speaker
Description
Hadron-therapy is a very promising treatment addressing a critical public health issue such as tumors irradiation with a millimetric precision to spare the neighboring healthy tissues. The main advantage of this technology compared to X-rays is having a very localized treatment avoiding a large energy deposition into healthy tissues. However, despite the great advantages, the main drawbacks of this technology, such as weight, cost and size, prevent the diffusion on a large scale. High-temperature superconductors (HTS) might provide an effective solution for more efficient and compact devices that do not require to build bigger rooms and dedicated infrastructures. The use of superconductivity would reduce the footprint of the device, while increasing the treated area and avoiding patching and the HTS would decrease the power consumption related to the cooling costs. However, superconductivity has always raised several concerns related to their thermal stability and expensive cost. Moreover, depending on the implemented operating strategy with higher momentum acceptance or fast ramping, more concerns are related to the AC losses and the field quality. Although the use of copper is still a safer choice for several facilities, this is no longer valid when using heavier particles. So the use of HTS can be the game-changer for making hadron-therapy, depending on our capacity to solve the aforementioned drawbacks. This talk is aiming at providing an overview of the status of the superconductivity for hadron-therapy and the benefits and drawbacks of fast ramping compact HTS magnets. It will then focus on the research direction together with the different strategies that can be implemented using HTS technology.
