Hadrontherapy is an emerging technique in cancer therapy that uses beams of charged particles. To meet the improved capability of hadrontherapy in matching the dose release with the cancer position, new dose monitoring techniques need to be developed
and introduced into clinical use. The measurement of the fluxes of the secondary particles produced by the hadron beam is of fundamental importance in the design of any dose monitoring device and is eagerly needed to tune Monte Carlo simulations. We report the measurements done with charged secondary particles produced from the interaction of a 80 MeV/u fully stripped carbon ion beam at the INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Sud, Catania, with a Poly-methyl methacrylate target. Charged secondary particles, produced at 90$degree$ with respect to the beam axis, have been tracked with a drift chamber, while their energy and time of flight has been measured by means of a LYSO scintillator. Secondary protons have been identified exploiting the energy and time of flight information, and their emission region has been reconstructed backtracking from the drift chamber to the target. Moreover a position scan of the target indicates that the reconstructed emission region follows the movement of the expected Bragg peak position. Exploting the reconstruction of the emission region, an accuracy on the Bragg peak determination in the submillimeter range has been obtained. The measured differential production rate for protons produced with $E^{rm Prod}_{rm kin} >$ 83 MeV and emitted at 90$degree$ with respect to the beam line is: $dN_{rm P}/(dN_{rm C}dOmega)(E^{rm Prod}_{rm kin} > 83 {rm ~MeV}, theta=90degree)= (2.69pm 0.08_{rm stat} pm 0.12_{rm sys})times 10^{-4} sr^{-1}$.
Proton and carbon ion therapy is an emerging technique used for the treatment of solid cancers. The monitoring of the dose delivered during such treatments and the on-line knowledge of the Bragg peak position is still a matter of research. A possible
technique exploits the collinear $511 kiloelectronvolt$ photons produced by positrons annihilation from $beta^+$ emitters created by the beam. This paper reports rate measurements of the $511 kiloelectronvolt$ photons emitted after the interactions of a $80 megaelectronvolt / u$ fully stripped carbon ion beam at the Laboratori Nazionali del Sud (LNS) of INFN, with a Poly-methyl methacrylate target. The time evolution of the $beta^+$ rate was parametrized and the dominance of $^{11}C$ emitters over the other species ($^{13}N$, $^{15}O$, $^{14}O$) was observed, measuring the fraction of carbon ions activating $beta^+$ emitters $A_0=(10.3pm0.7)cdot10^{-3}$. The average depth in the PMMA of the positron annihilation from $beta^+$ emitters was also measured, $D_{beta^+}=5.3pm1.1 millimeter$, to be compared to the expected Bragg peak depth $D_{Bragg}=11.0pm 0.5 millimeter$ obtained from simulations.
The emission of e+e- pairs from C+C collisions at an incident energy of 1 GeV per nucleon has been investigated. The measured production probabilities, spanning from the pi0-Dalitz to the rho/omega! invariant-mass region, display a strong excess abov
e the cocktail of standard hadronic sources. The bombarding-energy dependence of this excess is found to scale like pion production, rather than like eta production. The data are in good agreement with results obtained in the former DLS experiment.
