Status of the Commissioning of the LIGHT Prototype

The company A.D.A.M. (Application of Detectors and Accelerators to Medicine), a CERN spin-off, is working on the construction and testing of its first linear accelerator for medical application: LIGHT (Linac for Image-Guided Hadron Therapy). LIGHT is an innovative high frequency proton linac designed to accelerate proton beams up to 230 MeV for protontherapy applications. The LIGHT accelerator consists of three different linac sections: a 750 MHz Radio Frequency Quadrupole (RFQ) accelerating the beam up to 5 MeV; a 3 GHz Side Coupled Drift Tube Linac (SCDTL) up to 37.5 MeV; and a 3 GHz Cell Coupled Linac (CCL) section up to 230 MeV. The compact and modular design is based on cutting edge technologies developed for particle colliders and adapted to the needs of hadron therapy beams. A prototype of LIGHT is presently under commissioning at CERN. This paper describes the design aspects and the different stages of installation and commissioning of the LIGHT prototype with emphasis on beam tests results obtained during the past year at different energies.