Progress report of the single particle irradiation system to cell (SPICE)

At the National Institute of Radiological Sciences (NIRS), we constructed a microbeam system in 2003, the single particle irradiation to cell, SPICE. From the beginning of 2005, we redesigned it to improve the stability of the optical alignment of the system, and obtained an reduction of the beam size proportional to the vertical dimension of the object slits. As a result, SPICE is now capable of producing a beam size of approximately 10 μm diameter, and the particle numbers controllable to an intensity as low as single particles per second, and therefore a single particle irradiation facility has been successfully implemented. Moreover, these conditions can be easily reproduced with a employing a routine procedure. We describe in detail the modifications of the beam line and results, demonstrating the improvements. In addition, results from our first biological experiments are shown.