First Performance Calculations for the Very High Energy Electron Radiation Therapy Experiment at PRAE

International audienceThe Platform for Research and Applications with Electrons (PRAE) project aims at creating a multidisciplinary R&D platform at the Orsay campus, joining various scientific communities involved in radiobiology, subatomic physics, instrumentation, particle accelerators and clinical research around a high-performance electron accelerator with beam energies up to 70 MeV and later 140 MeV, in order to perform a series of unique measurements and challenging R&D. In this paper we will report the first optics design and performance evaluations of such a multidisciplinary machine, focusing on Very High Energy Electrons (VHEE) innovative Radiation Therapy (RT) applications in particular by allowing Grid and FLASH methodologies, which are likely to represent a major breakthrough in RT. Functional specifications include beam intensities to produce dose rates from 2 Gy/min to 100Gy/sec, beam sizes with diameters from 0.5 mm to 10 cm or more of homogeneous beams and monitoring devices with accuracy in the order of 1-2% for single or multiple beams and single or multiple fractions in biological and ppreclinical applications. High energies (>140 MeV) would be also needed for GRID therapy