The Institute of Physics (IoP) of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (ASCR) has awarded a contract for the development and delivery of a “Laser Driven Ion Beamline for Multidisciplinary Applications” to the INFN (National Institute of Nuclear Physics) – LNS (National Laboratories of Southern Italy).
ELIMAIA (ELI Multidisciplinary Applications of laser-Ion Acceleration) will be one of the key secondary source target area of the ELI Beamlines facility. The Contract concerns the design, assembly, performance optimization, and delivery of a complete ion transport beamline and a number of dosimetric endpoints that will enable the users to apply laser-driven ion beams in multidisciplinary fields.
“We are very happy to find in INFN-LNS a reliable partner with lots of experience in development and delivery of accelerator devices for multidisciplinary applications. I hope that our cooperation will be more than successful”, says prof. Jan Řídký, the director of the Institute of Physics.
ELIMAIA will be commissioned in the ELI Beamlines facility in December 2017 and will aim at demonstrating that the overall cost of the standard acceleration facilities can be drastically reduced by using innovative compact approaches based on high power laser-matter interaction. In fact the main goal of the ELIMAIA beamline is to provide stable, fully characterized and tuneable particle beams accelerated by PW-class lasers and to offer them to a broad Czech and international community of users for multidisciplinary applications.
“To perform such important contract is a clear recognition of the long INFN history and tradition in designing and developing accelerator devices for multidisciplinary applications, including the medical ones such as the hadrontherapy center operating at INFN-LNS in Catania”, says the director of INFN-LNS prof. G. Cuttone. An international scientific network particularly interested in future applications of laser driven ions for hadrontherapy named ELIMED (ELI MEDical applications) has already been established. Nevertheless, this is only one of the potential applications of the ELIMAIA beamline which will be open to several proposals from a multidisciplinary user community such as radiobiology, time resolved radiography of different materials, beam-target nuclear reactions generating isotopes for positron emission tomography or producing high brilliance secondary radiation sources (e.g. neutrons and alpha-particles), etc.
