Diamond detectors for the monitoring of carbon-ion therapy beams

Over the last few years a significant improvement in the production of single-crystal diamonds produced by Chemical Vapour Deposition (sc-CVD) has been made. Since the availability of the so called ‘detector-grade’ diamond material, we have worked on its application within the framework of the heavy-ion beam therapy. In this paper a study of the sc-CVD detector used for the monitoring of carbon-beam properties is presented. We show the on-line monitoring of the beam flux with an efficiency of (100±2)% for rates up to 108 ions/s for the beam energy of 88 MeV/u. For the energy range of 80–430 MeV/u the monitoring of the beam energy is performed with respective relative resolutions from 3 to 11%. Our results show that a compact on-line beam dose and profile monitor with a required relative precision of 1% percent is feasible with today's technology.