Recently, the results of a study on laser treatment of tumors were published in the Physical Review Letters. Specific research claims that the theory that collision-free acceleration mechanism can be used to generate such a high-quality and high-energy proton beam is achieved by calibrating the proton energy to 100 mega-electron volts under the existing laser pointer conditions to meet the laser proton knife Requirements for treatment to kill tumor cells. It is understood that the research has been supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences Pilot Class B project, the National Key R & D Program, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
It is said that in the research, researchers used circularly polarized watt-level ultra-strong ultra-short laser pulses to bombard nanometer-thick film targets, and obtained high-quality, quasi-monoenergetic high-quality proton beams with a peak energy of 9 MeV. The peak current is as high as 3 × 1012 protons / MeV / sr, which becomes a laser proton beam that can kill tumor cells and protect healthy cells. Schematic diagram of high-quality proton beam accelerated by collision-free shock wave driven by circularly polarized tile ultra-strong and short laser
In fact, high-energy proton beams have unique Bragg peaks when they propagate in matter. In simple terms, protons generally lose very little energy during the transmission process. After a certain transmission distance, most of the energy of the proton beams is mainly deposited at the ends. Therefore, when this feature is applied to the treatment of cancer in the body, the green laser pointer effectively uses high energy located at the end to kill cancer cells and protects healthy cells. In fact, the traditional accelerator-based proton knife tumor treatment has made great progress. It is difficult to popularize because it is very expensive.
This time, the circularly polarized petawatt ultra-strong and ultra-short Laser Engraver drive accelerates the formation of high-quality proton beams. Because its acceleration gradient (the energy obtained by particles within a unit length) is much larger than traditional accelerators, the scale of the accelerator is greatly reduced, which is expected to reduce the cost of treatment. Becoming a new generation proton scalpel for cancer treatment, the results of this study also represent a key step forward in laser-driven proton scalpel solutions. It is understood that the ultra-short pulses, high-quality and high-energy proton beams generated by this ultra-ultra-short laser drive can also be used in proton photography and material detection, fast fusion of laser nuclear fusion, laboratory astrophysics, laser nuclear physics, and nuclear medicine, etc. Research.