The heavy-ion microbeam at the Tandar accelerator and its biomedical applications

P. STOLIAR; A. J. KREINER; M. E. DEBRAY; M. E. CARABALLO; A. A. VALDA; A. E. SCHWINT; J. M. KESQUE; H. SOMACAL; H. DIPAOLO; A. A. BURLON; J. DAVIDSON; M.DAVIDSON; C. ROMANO; J. CURIALE; M. J. OZAFRÁN; M. E. VÁZQUEZ; D. MINSKY

Santos, Brasil. Exposición Oral (A.Kreiner)

Congreso; V Latinoaerican Symposium on Nuclear Physics, XXVI Reunião de Trabalho sobre Física Nuclear no Brasil; 2003

Sociedade Brasileira de Física

Recently a heavy-ion microbeam (also called nuclear microscope) has been installed at the Tandar accelerator in Buenos Aires. This device consists essentially of a set of precision collimators (object and antiscattering slits) in front of a raster scan coil (which sweeps the beam over the sample) and a set of three high-precision magnetic quadrupoles (triplet) which is capable of focussing a heavy-ion beam down to micrometer dimensions. It enables us to determine two-dimensional concentration maps of trace elements of biomedical significance with micron spatial resolution. The analytic technique employed in the present study is known as micro-PIXE (Particle Induced X-ray Emission). It is based on the detection of characteristic X-rays of the elements in the sample, following the irradiation with a focused 16O ion beam. Microdistributions of prospective compounds of interest for Boron Neutron Capture Therapy on histological sections of cancer and normal tissue from hamsters injected with the drug are obtained.