Design of a Microwave Accelerating Cavity for Cancer Hadrontherapy

In this chapter we review the design of a PBG-based resonant cavity, realized and characterized by us for the first time in Europe. This cavity is able to accelerate hadrons in order to define the elementary unit cell of a high-efficiency and low-cost accelerator, whose sizes are smaller than the classical cyclotron, which is now used to accelerate hadrons with a lot of limitations. The designed PBG accelerator will allow the attainment of important results in terms of therapy efficiency and feasibility, reaching a higher number of patients because of the reliability of the accelerator, which is the system kernel, and the falling implementation cost.