Progetto e caratterizzazione di acceleratori adronici su materiali a PBG per adroterapia dei tumori

The modern hadrontherapy of cancer by protons and other hadrons appears very promising due to three physical properties of the involved particles. Firstly, the penetration of those particles into the human body does not make any significant diffusion. Moreover, the maximum energy is leaved almost abruptly at the end of the travel producing several serious damage to DNA also in deeper located ill tissues. Finally, being charged particles, they can quite easly be formed as narrow and scanned pencil beams at any desired penetration depth so that any part of tumor can be accurately and rapidly irradiated. The consequence is that the hadrontherapy allows highly conformal treatment of deep seated tumors with millimeter accuracy, giving minimal doses to the crossed and surrounding tissues different from the target. In this work, developed in the TEGAF project by Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), a 15 GHz PBG-based accelerating cavity has been successfully designed, fabricated and experimentally characterized for the first time in Europe.