Preliminary Studies of a Compact VHEE Linear Accelerator System for FLASH Radiotherapy

The FLASH Radiotherapy is a revolutionary new tech-nique in the cancer cure: it spares healthy tissue from thedamage of the ionizing radiation maintaining the tumor con-trol as efficient as in the conventional radiotherapy. To allowthe implementation of the FLASH Therapy concept intoactual clinical use, it is necessary to have an acceleratorable to deliver high dose per pulse (>1-2 Gy) in very shorttime pulse duration (s) and high dose rate (>106Gy/s).Today, low energy (up to 7 MeV) S-band LINACs are beingused in radiobiology and pre-clinical applications. However,in order to treat deep tumors the energy of the electronsshould achieve the range of 50-250 MeV [1] [2]. In thispaper we address the main issues in the design of a compactC band (5.712 GHz) Very High Electron Energy (VHEE)for FLASH Radiotherapy. We present preliminary studiesof a C-band system done at La Sapienza and INFN, aimingto reach a high accelerating gradient and high current neces-sary to deliver a dose>1 Gy/pulse, within a beam pulse ofs.