Abstract Body

With building up the R&D platform FLASHlab@PITZ we aim to provide unique R&D capabilities for studying electron FLASH radiation therapy and radiation biology to the benefit of the FLASH RT community.

After a short introduction, the talk will compare thermionic emission-based electron sources as mainly used for radiation therapy up to now and photo injector-based sources. Due to their different operation principles, this has consequences on the reachable electron beam and irradiation properties.

The major part of the talk will discuss the different steps of preparing and commissioning FLASHlab@PITZ. The first step describes the commissioning of the mother beamline from which the FLASH RT beamline is split off. It demonstrated a tight control of the electron beam properties, high stability, and large tuning range of the PITZ beam parameters.

The second step is the commissioning of a first start-up beamline that is used for early experiments on FLASH RT R&D: beam characterization, dosimetry and first experiments with chemical and biological samples. The first measurement results will be reported.

The next step is the design for realizing the full beamline of FLASHlab@PITZ. This will allow a full control of the transverse beam properties and include kicker systems for both transverse directions.

For allowing in vivo experiments at PITZ as soon as possible close collaboration with experienced national partners was established. Funds for realizing a container solution for an animal lab were allocated and the realization is ongoing.

Last but not least, we propose an idea to use the special beam capabilities at PITZ to have a combined online localization of tumor tissue using electron induced X-ray fluorescence imaging and treating the tumor within a total time of only 1 ms. This allows tightly confining the dose to moving cancer tissue (e.g. in the lung) also for FLASH RT.