Adi Hanuka
Dr. Adi Hanuka, of the Electrical Engineering Department at the Technion, under the supervision of Prof. Levi Schachter, is performing research in the field of particle accelerators which are used in radiation therapy machines for cancer treatment.
Today's conventional radiation machines are relatively large, expensive and specialized machines that remain rather inaccessible to large portions of the medical industry and patients. The accelerating component is usually one meter long, and the entire radiation machine is usually the size of a room. The radiation therefore does not have direct access to the tumor, and thus healthy tissue is inevitably damaged as radiation passes through it. Also, since the accelerating component is relatively large, it rotates around the patient in order to deliver radiation from several positions, which means that the treatment is lengthy and cumbersome.
Dr. Hanuka’s research is focused on Dielectric Laser-driven Accelerators (DLAs) as an alternative paradigm to today’s conventional radio-frequency (RF) accelerators. DLAs operate at optical frequencies which are much smaller than RF, and Dr. Hanuka’s theoretical and experimental research shows that it is feasible to shrink the accelerating component by up to six orders of magnitude (from ~1 meter to ~1 micrometer). Second, Dr. Hanuka’s research shows that DLAs can potentially support accelerating fields one to two orders of magnitude more powerful than conventional RF accelerators (1 GigaVolt/meter versus 35 MegaVolt/meter). And finally, DLAs are fabricated via lithographic techniques that are relatively low-cost and are suitable for mass production.
The resulting radiation device could potentially be quite a breakthrough in the field of radiation oncology. It is expected to be smaller, cheaper, and more portable than conventional RF accelerators – a so-called “Accelerator on Chip” – thus being available to more communities and patients. And no less important, it would allow greater radiation accuracy since it would facilitate treatment directly to the exact contour of the tumor, thereby reducing damage to healthy tissue.