Status Report of the HIT Project

Major progress of the Heidelberg ion beam cancer therapy center took place in 2005. The accelerator part of the building was finished to the point that the installation of the accelerator could be started. Many factory acceptance tests of accelerator components have been performed as well as numerous commissioning activities at GSI. Organisational Aspects Since April 2005 the University Clinic Heidelberg is responsible for the follow up of the medical part of the HIT facility. This includes the complete technique delivered by Siemens (eg. raster scanning, patient positioning, medical IT). Therefore, the corresponding GSI experts (4 persons) are now employed by the HIT-Service GmbH, a 100 % daughter of the university clinic, which is charged to operate the facility. Progress of the Building Since October 2005 the building was finished to the point that the accelerator assembly could be started. However, during all the time since then the building companies are still busy to finish their work in the accelerator rooms, especially for the commissioning of the technical infrastructure (Fig. 1). The mile stone of finishing of the accelerator part of the building was finally reached end of January 2006. GSI has pushed forward this process through intense follow up of the building process and substantial help for the understanding and handling of the accelerator specific technical infrastructure. Figure 1: Installation of the accelerator cooling water system. Progress of the Accelerator System The year 2005 was marked by the follow up of the production process of the accelerator components. Factory acceptance tests took place for many magnets, vacuum chambers, power supplies, ion sources, LINAC RF amplifiers, synchrotron RF system, control system components as well as beam diagnostics for the LINAC and partly for the synchrotron. At GSI, the magnetic measurements of the synchrotron dipoles have been started (Fig. 2) as well as the preassembly of the accelerator components to "ready for final assembly" modules. Figure 2: Synchrotron dipoles during magnetic measurements at GSI. The 216 MHz LINAC RF system containing three amplifier chains for the RFQ, the IH tank and a small debuncher cavity has been almost completed. The 1.4 MW cavity amplifier from BERTRONIX Electronic GmbH, Munich, could be successfully commissioned at a GSI test setup [1]. After various tests and commissioning steps at GSI, the stage could be delivered early in January 2006 to THALES Broadcast & Multimedia AG in Turgi, Switzerland, for integration into the complete amplifier setup. All power supplies for the 1.4 MW stage have been finished by THALES B&M as well as the 120 kW driver amplifier. The 200 kW amplifier for the RFQ has been delivered by THALES B&M to GSI in August 2005 and has been operated successfully at GSI for RFQ beam tests [2]. Already in 2004 RFQ beam tests using proton beams have been performed at the Institute for Applied Physics (IAP) at Frankfurt University in order to check the main operating parameters of the RFQ and to measure the energy spread of the ion beam behind of the RFQ using an analyzing magnet. During 2005, a new RFQ test bench has been installed at GSI and precise time-of-flight measurements of the RFQ end energy could be successfully performed [2]. In addition, a number of further components for the HIT facility could be tested successfully at the RFQ test bench, in particular, major parts of the control system and several beam diagnostics devices like profile grids, Faraday cups, beam transformers, phase probes as well as the corresponding electronics equipment. With the 20 MV IH-type drift tube linac cavity [1][3][4] several RF measurements and RF tuning steps have been performed successfully already at the factory at PINK EXTERNAL-HIT-01