Laser accelerated ions and their potential for therapy

The recent development in laser acceleration of protons and ions has stimulated ideas for using this concept as innovative and compact therapy accelerator. While currently achieved parameters do not yet allow a realistic conceptual study, we find that our simulation studies on ion collimation and transport, based on output data from the PHELIX experiment, already give useful guidance. Of particular importance are the chromatic aberrations of the first collimator as interface between the production target and a conventional accelerator structure. We show that the resulting 6D phase space matches well with the requirements for a hypothetical synchrotron injection.