Abstract
As the development of the charged particle cancer treatment and the accomplishment long-term human space travel, the knowledge of the charged particle induced cellular biological effect is getting more and more important. The goal of this work is to develop a simple construction, easy installation and cost-effective charged particle cell irradiation system on the beam line of the 3 MV KN Van de Graaff accelerator in the Accelerator Laboratory of National Tsing Hua University (NTHU). In the system design, we applied the backscattering technique to instead of the usage of 90° bending magnet, which widely used for beam direction bending in other systems. This improvement is largely simplifying the system design as well as massively decreases the budget requirement in system installation. Moreover, the applications of silicon nitride membrane to the vacuum seal membrane and basement of cell culture dish in this project effectively eliminate the particle energy dispersion within a cell target. Based on the system performance test results, we confirm that NTHU charged particle cell irradiation system can provide a uniform vertical charged particle beam to execute the cellular or subcellular charged particle irradiation.