Preliminary Study of 4 T Superconducting Dipole for a Light Rotating Gantry for Ion-Therapy

A collaboration between CERN, CNAO, INFN, and MedAustron has been formed aiming at designing a light rotating gantry suitable for hadron therapy based on 430 MeV/n carbon ion beams. After a first design for a 3 T dipole field, as the backbone of the gantry magnetic system, now the collaboration is looking at an alternative design, for at least 4 T field with a faster ramp rate. The magnet is designed according to the cosθ layout to be wound with Nb-Ti superconducting Rutherford cable. One of the main challenges is the very small curvature radius of 1.65 m with a relatively large aperture, of 70-90 mm. Another challenge is the use of indirect cooling despite the cycling operation of 0.4 T/s. The paper reports the preliminary investigation for a 4.5 T dipole. The design will be followed by the construction of a 1 m long demonstrator to be manufactured and tested at INFN (LASA laboratory) in about three years. The conductor is a Rutherford cable of 2.6 μm Nb-Ti filament size, embedded in a Cu-Mn alloy matrix. The resulting gantry is very compact: the collaboration is working on integration between gantry structure and magnets to allow reducing the rotating weight in the range 50-80 tons, which is a factor 4 to 5 less than the present state-of-the-art.