Experimental verification of beam switching operation for multiple-ion therapy applications at HIMAC

Abstract A study of multiple-ion therapy with charged heavy-ion beams was performed to improve outcomes of refractory cancer treatments. We proposed the accelerator operation method for applying the multiple-ion therapy, to quickly switch the ion species and energies of the output beams. In this method, the irradiation ion species can be changed only by switching the selected ion source and the injector parameters, and the output beam energies can be varied without changing the magnetic operation patterns of the synchrotron. We verified the effectiveness of our approach by conducting experiments at the Heavy Ion Medical Accelerator in Chiba (HIMAC) and confirmed that the approach can provide the fast switching of both the ion species and the beam energies. The experimental results also demonstrated that our approach will greatly reduce the commissioning time and the routine adjustments for multiple-ion beams.