Concept of a compact rotating gantry for laser acceleration based proton therapy

n ionization chambers not all released charge is collected due to recombination of charge carriers. A physical description of the correction factor has been established for pulsed beams for many decades. However, it is only accurate if the pulse length is short compared to the collection time of the ionization chamber. In this contribution a new, more generalized description of the Saturation correction (i.e. for arbitrary pulse lengths) is presented.
Experiments have been performed using a Roos ionization chamber (TM34001, PTW Freiburg, Germany) because this model is a planparallel chamber often used in clinics. The pulse length dependence was investigated at the superconducting electron linear accelerator ELBE. For the new theoretical description a system of partial differential equations is solved iteratively. The free parameters were adjusted for best agreement with the experiment.
The experiment shows, that the established description of saturation correction is only valid for pulses shorter than 10 μs. Furthermore, our new theoretical description allows the determination of Saturation correction in a wide range, e.g., for beam time structures which are experimentally difficult to realize and for longer pulse durations. Hereby the calculation results in a better understanding of the recombination process by giving insight into the dynamics of charge carrier distributions. In this way we can show that the established theoretical formalism is also valid at longer pulses, if the previoulsy used fixed parameters are reintroduced as pulse length dependent. For the Roos chamber the dependence of these parameters is demonstrated.