Commissioning of a gantry beamline with rotator at a synchrotron-based ion therapy center

This paper provides an overview of the worldwide first commissioning of a gantry beamline with a rotator at the MedAustron synchrotron-based proton/ion cancer therapy facility in Wiener Neustadt, Austria. The gantry beamline consists of the high energy beam transfer (HEBT) line and the gantry beam transport system. It transports the beam from the synchrotron to the gantry-room isocenter. The HEBT transports the beam from the synchrotron to the gantry entrance, which is the coupling point between the HEBT and the gantry. The rotator is one of the HEBT modules, thus it is an integral part of the gantry beamline. The MedAustron rotator is the worldwide first rotator system used to match slowly extracted asymmetric beams from the synchrotron to the rotating gantry. In this paper, main attention is paid to ion-optical and beam-alignment aspects of the beamline commissioning. A novel orbit-correction and beam-alignment technique has been developed specifically for the beamline with the rotator. While the theoretical concept of the rotator has existed for almost two decades, the MedAustron rotator is the first hardware implementation of this concept all over the world. The presented overview of the beamline commissioning includes a description of the principal technical solutions and main results of the first beam-transport measurements. Since the measured beam size and beam position agree well with theoretical predictions, one can conclude that the proof-of-concept of the rotator-matching has been successfully accomplished.