ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE DOSIMETRY FOR THE ELIMED BEAM LINE

Hadrontherapy is a type of external beam therapy which uses charged hadrons, mainly protons and carbon ions, to neutralize tumor growth with an improved precision and biological effect allowing to obtain a better dose deposition thanks to their characteristic Bragg peak, improving the ballistic precision and efficacy of the treatment, if compared to X-rays used in conventional radiotherapy. One of the most challenging ideas, driving recent activities based on hadrontherapy applications, consists on using laser-target interaction as a source of high-energy ions for possible future medical applications, in order to reduce the costs of the infrastructure and increase the flexibility, if compared with conventional acceleration technics. Several international collaborations and experiments have been launched in the last years aiming to explore the feasibility of using laser-driven sources for potential medical applications. In this framework, a collaboration between the INFN-LNS (National Institute for Nuclear Physics Laboratori Nazionali del Sud, Catania, Italy) and the ASCR-FZU (Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Science), in charge for the ELI-Beamlines facility implementation, has been established with the main purpose to realize a transport and dosimetry beam line, named ELIMED (ELI- Beamlines MEDical and multidisciplinary applications), for laser accelerated ions. In this thesis, dosimetry of laser-driven proton beams is discussed and results obtained with the dosimetric detectors developed for the ELIMED beam line are described. In particular, a description of the state-of-the-art of the different research centers available around the world and their activities, with the aim to develop laser-driven ion sources for medical therapy and a brief description of the laser acceleration is presented. A detailed description of the ELIMED beam line is given with a focus on the details of the dosimetric systems of ELIMED beam line. The characterization of RCFs and FC with conventional beams, performed at the CATANA proton therapy facility at LNS is reported. The characterization of dosimetric devices of ELIMED beam line, FC, SEM and multi-gap IC, in an experimental campaign carried out at Laboratoire d$'$Optique Appliquée (LOA, Paris, France), is discussed. Aim of the experiment has been the characterization of the detectors in terms of response, in order to reduce the EMP signal and to investigate the frequencies of the signal due to the oscillation modes of the EMP inside and outside the interaction chamber. The results obtained have confirmed that using a proper low-pass filters a signal generated from the fast ions component, accelerated in the laser matter interaction,can been discriminated, for each dosimetric detector. The results discussed in this thesis demonstrate that the detectors designed and realized for the ELIMED beamline will allow to perform measurements for multidisciplinary applications with the level of accuracy required for these kind of irradiations.