Medical applications for particle physics

The technologies developed for particle physics experiments have found numerous medical applications, particularly in the field of radiotherapy. Simulation results and analysis for several of these medical applications will be presented which include: commissioning of a carbon ion beam at MedAus- tron, design and development of LhARA, preliminary design and work on a new detector called the SmartPhantom. Simulations played a key role to the carbon commissioning effort, and paved the way for MedAustron to treat their first patient with carbon ions during the summer of 2019. Beam line simulations also played a critical role for a proposed state of the art facility, LhARA. These simulations were used to characterise the beam that a laser source delivers, improving upon previous analysis and supporting ongoing developments for LhARA. Finally, work has gone into the design of an instrumented water phantom incorporating scintillating fibres. Simulation work has shown that placing thin scintillating fibres at several locations in a water phantom upstream of a cell culture sample could allow one to reconstruct a Bragg peak. If fully realised, the detector could serve as an online monitor capable of monitoring the dose for each shot. This detector would be useful to evaluate the reproducibility of the beam LhARA delivers, and could also find use in radiobiological experiments.Open Acces