VELO on tour
The last months have been a busy time for the VELO detector as the beam monitoring system made its first recent trip out of the lab, to the 40 MeV proton beam line at the University of Birmingham. OMA fellow Jacinta Yap accompanied QUASARs Roland Schnuerer and Hao Zhang for measurements, marking a major milestone in their projects and the development of the detector. It was the first time that the recent adaptations described in the published Journal paper were tested, achieving first test results towards its development as a stand-alone beam monitor for medical accelerators. A full week of measurements were performed together with collaborators Tony Price from the University of Birmingham and Tomasz Szumlak, to test the VELO detector with various settings of the cyclotron.
Picture: f.l.t.r.: Tony Price, Tomasz Szumlak, Roland and Jacinta
The focus was to study the changes of the beam current and variation of beam profiles through different collimators. A lot of data was taken and is now being analysed.
It could already be seen that the hard work paid off and the results are expected to give a clear idea about the capabilities of the VELO detector as an online beam monitor. Results will be presented at the upcoming conferences IPAC19 in Melbourne and PTCOG58 in Manchester.
Roland presenting in Krakow
Roland was also invited by his collaborator Tomasz Szumlak to give a 45 minutes Seminar of ‘Novel silicon based beam monitors for medical accelerators’ at the AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow, where he presented the project as a whole and could give a first glimpse of the achieved results. Further, he outlined the work at the Clatterbridge Cancer Centre, where VELO in combination with OMA fellow Navrit Bal and the Medipix3 detector, will be used for more beam diagnostics studies.