Proton linac-based therapy facility for ultra-high dose rate (FLASH) treatment

As an advanced treatment method in the past five years,ultra-high dose rate(FLASH)radiotherapy as a breakthrough and milestone in radiotherapy development has been verified to be much less harmful to healthy tissues in different experiments.FLASH treatments require an instantaneous dose rate as high as hundreds of grays per second to complete the treatment in less than 100 ms.Current proton therapy facilities with the spread-out of the Bragg peak formed by different energy layers,to our knowledge,cannot easily achieve an adequate dose rate for FLASH treatments because the energy layer switch or gantry rotation of current facilities requires a few seconds,which is relatively long.A new design for a therapy facility based on a proton linear accelerator(linac)for FLASH treatment is proposed herein.It is designed under two criteria:no mechanical motion and no magnetic field variation.The new therapy facility can achieve an ultrahigh dose rate of up to 300 Gy/s;however,it delivers an instantaneous dose of 30 Gy within 100 ms to complete a typical FLASH treatment.The design includes a compact proton linac with permanent magnets,a fast beam kicker in both azimuth and elevation angles,a fixed gantry with a static superconducting coil to steer proton bunches with all energy,a fast beam scanner using radio-frequency(RF)deflectors,and a fast low-level RF system.All relevant principles and conceptual proposals are presented herein.

B_((s))→D^(∗∗)_((s))form factors in HQEFT and model independent analysis of relevant semileptonic decays with NP effects

The form factors of B(s)decays into P-wave excited charmed mesons(including D∗0(2300),D1(2430),D1(2420),D∗2(2460)and their strange counterparts,denoted generically as D∗∗(s))are systematically calculated via QCD sum rules in the framework of heavy quark effective field theory(HQEFT).We consider contributions up to the next leading order of heavy quark expansion and give all the relevant form factors,including the scalar and tensor ones only relevant for possible new physics effects.The expressions for the form factors in terms of several universal wave functions are derived via heavy quark expansion.These universal functions can be evaluated through QCD sum rules.Then,the numerical results of the form factors are presented.With the form factors given here,a model independent analysis of relevant semileptonic decays B(s)→D∗∗(s)lν¯l is performed,including the contributions from possible new physics effects.Our predictions for the differential decay widths,branching fractions,and ratios of branching fractions R(D∗∗(s))may be tested in more precise experiments in the future.