The present situation and the prospect of medical cyclotrons in China

The paper introduces the increasing applications of cyclotrons in the field of health care and some major work carried out abroad. Its emphasis is placed on the introduction to the application status and the development process of medical cyclotrons in China. The paper has assessed possible developing trends of medical cyclotrons based on the current application demand and the technological development status.

     

The design and construction of a pulsed beam generation system based on high intensity cyclotron

In order to perform the studies on a pulsed beam generation system based on a high intensity cyclotron, a test beam line with a pulsed beam generation for a 10 MeV compact cyclotron (CYCIAE-10) has been designed and constructed at China Institute of Atomic Energy (CIAE). A 70 MHz continuous H-beam can be pulsed to the pulse length of less than 10 ns with a repetition rate of 4.4 MHz. The sine waveform with a frequency of 2.2 MHz is adopted for the chopper and a mesh structure with single drift and dual gaps is used for the 70 MHz buncher. A helical resonator is designed and constructed based on simulations and experiments on the RF matching for the chopper. A helical inductance loop that is exceptionally large of its kind and equipped with water cooling for the resonator has been successfully wound and a 500 W solid RF amplifier has been manufactured. A special measuring device has been designed, which can be used to measure both the DC beam and the pulsed beam. The required pulsed beam was obtained after pulsed beam tuning.     

The physics design of magnet in 14 MeV cyclotron

The 14 MeV, 400 μA compact cyclotron is under construction at China Institute of Atomic Energy (CIAE). The design of main magnet and the result of beam dynamics in the cyclotron will be described in this paper, including the choice of main parameters of magnet, the method of shimming isochronous field in the compact cyclotron and optimization of the magnetic field in central region. The beam will be accelerated to 14.6 MeV by optimizing the magnet structure.

     

High performance computation on beam dynamics problems in high intensity compact cyclotrons

This paper presents the research progress in the beam dynamics problems for future high intensity compact cyclotrons by utilizing the state-of-the-art high performance computation technology. A “Start-to-Stop” model, which includes both the interaction of the internal particles of a single bunch and the mutual interaction of neighboring multiple bunches in the radial direction, is established for compact cyclotrons with multi-turn extraction. This model is then implemented in OPAL-CYCL, which is a 3D object-oriented parallel code for large scale particle simulations in cyclotrons. In addition, to meet the running requirement of parallel computation, we have constructed a small scale HPC cluster system and tested its performance. Finally, the high intensity beam dynamics problems in the 100 MeV compact cyclotron, which is being constructed at CIAE, are studied using this code and some conclusions are drawn.

     

The design and construction of a pulsed beam generation system based on high intensity cyclotron

In order to perform the studies on a pulsed beam generation system based on a high intensity cyclotron, a test beam line with a pulsed beam generation for a 10 MeV compact cyclotron (CYCIAE-10) has been designed and constructed at China Institute of Atomic Energy (CIAE). A 70 MHz continuous H-beam can be pulsed to the pulse length of less than 10 ns with a repetition rate of 4.4 MHz. The sine waveform with a frequency of 2.2 MHz is adopted for the chopper and a mesh structure with single drift and dual gaps is used for the 70 MHz buncher. A helical resonator is designed and constructed based on simulations and experiments on the RF matching for the chopper. A helical inductance loop that is exceptionally large of its kind and equipped with water cooling for the resonator has been successfully wound and a 500 W solid RF amplifier has been manufactured. A special measuring device has been designed, which can be used to measure both the DC beam and the pulsed beam. The required pulsed beam was obtained after pulsed beam tuning.