Towards Laser Driven Hadron Cancer Radiotherapy: A Review of Progress

TL;DR

This review discusses recent progress and remaining challenges in developing laser-driven proton and heavy ion beams for cancer radiotherapy, highlighting its potential as an alternative to traditional accelerator-based methods.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of advancements in laser-driven hadron therapy and identifies key technological and scientific hurdles to clinical implementation.

Findings

Laser technology has advanced to produce high-energy proton and heavy ion beams.

Significant progress has been made in laser acceleration techniques for cancer therapy.

Remaining challenges include beam quality control and system scalability.

Abstract

It has been known for about sixty years that proton and heavy ion therapy is a very powerful radiation procedure for treating tumours. It has an innate ability to irradiate tumours with greater doses and spatial selectivity compared with electron and photon therapy and hence is a tissue sparing procedure. For more than twenty years powerful lasers have generated high energy beams of protons and heavy ions and hence it has been frequently speculated that lasers could be used as an alternative to RF accelerators to produce the particle beams necessary for cancer therapy. The present paper reviews the progress made towards laser driven hadron cancer therapy and what has still to be accomplished to realise its inherent enormous potential.