Geant4 simulation of the ELIMED transport and dosimetry beam line for high-energy laser-driven ion beam multidisciplinary applications

TL;DR

This paper presents a Geant4-based Monte Carlo simulation tool for designing and optimizing the ELIMED beam line, supporting high-energy laser-driven ion beam applications including medical uses, with detailed results on beam transport and dose prediction.

Contribution

It introduces a modular Geant4 simulation application for the ELIMED beam line, enabling efficient design, optimization, and prediction of beam parameters for laser-accelerated ion applications.

Findings

Energy spectra and transmission efficiency results obtained from end-to-end simulations

The simulation tool supports experimental setup customization and analysis

Predicted dose distributions relevant for clinical applications

Abstract

The ELIMED (MEDical and multidisciplinary application at ELI Beamlines) beam line is being developed at INFN-LNS with the aim of transporting and selecting in energy proton and ion beams accelerated by laser-matter interaction at ELI Beamlines in Prague. It will be a section of the ELIMAIA (ELI Multidisciplinary Applications of laser-Ions Acceleration) beam line, dedicated to applications, including the medical one, of laser-accelerated ion beams [1,2]. A Monte Carlo model has been developed to support the design of the beam line in terms of particle transport efficiency, to optimize the transport parameters at the irradiation point in air and, furthermore, to predict beam parameters in order to deliver dose distributions of clinical relevance. The application has been developed using the Geant4 [3] Monte Carlo toolkit and has been designed in a modular way in order to easily switch on/off geometrical components according to different experimental setups and users requirements, as reported in [4], describing the early-stage code and simulations. The application has been delivered to ELI Beamlines and will be available for future ELIMAIA's users as ready-to-use tool useful during experiment preparation and analysis. The final version of the developed application will be described in detail in this contribution, together with the final results, in terms of energy spectra and transmission efficiency along the in-vacuum beam line, obtained by performing end-to-end simulations.