Laser-Driven Particle Acceleration Towards Radiobiology and Medicine

Antonio Giulietti is a physicist operating at INO (National Institute of Optics, Italy). He has been CNR Research Director and Head of the Unit "Adriano Gozzini" of INO. He founded ILIL (Intense Laser Irradiation Laboratory) in the CNR Campus of Pisa which has been operating for more than 20 years with scientific output and international collaboration making ILIL a primary reference in the domain of laser-plasmas. AG is author of more than 200 papers published on international refereed journals, mainly in the field of laser and plasma physics, plasma instabilities relevant to Inertial Fusion, radiation from plasmas, laser-driven particle acceleration and their biomedical potential. AG has organized and chaired a large number of international conferences on these topics. He is member of the International Advisory Board of the International Conference on High Energy Density Science, annually held in Yokohama. His research group has been supported by CNR, Italian Ministry of Education, Italian Ministry of Health, European Union, Extreme light Infrastructure (ELI), CEA (France), JSPS (Japan). AG has been very active in teaching and tutoring students and young scientists. Young scientists trained in the AG' lab are today Professors or Researchers in prestigious Universities or Research Institutions, including Universities of Pisa, Siena, Milano, Bordeaux, Oxford, Belfast, Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau, CEA-Saclay, BMI-Berlin, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. In the last ten years 2006-2015 AG devoted most of his work at studying possible medical uses of laser-driven particle accelerators. Experiments performed in Pisa and at CEA-Saclay led to the discovery of a high efficiency acceleration regime allowing the production of electron bunches whose charge and kinetic energy are suitable for radiotherapy. Those electrons were also used to drive a gamma sources and produce photo-activation, so opening a perspective of interest for nuclear medicine. In the meantime AG promoted R&D studies to achieve a practical usability of laser-driven accelerators in radiobiology and clinics, also in collaboration with CEA-Saclay and University of Osaka. In this framework he recently published (2015) a review paper on “Laser-Plasma Particle Sources for Biology and Medicine”.