Thin silicon strip detectors for beam monitoring in Micro-beam Radiation Therapy

Microbeam Radiation Therapy (MRT) is an emerging cancer treatment that is currently being developed at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France. This technique uses a highly collimated and fractionated X-ray beam array with extremely high dose rate and very small divergence, to benefit from the dose-volume effect, thus sparing healthy tissue. In case of any beam anomalies and system malfunctions, special safety measures must be installed, such as an emergency safety shutter that requires continuous monitoring of the beam intensity profile. Within the 3DMiMic project, a novel silicon strip detector that can tackle the special features of MRT, such as the extremely high spatial resolution and dose rate, has been developed to be part of the safety shutter system. The first prototypes have been successfully fabricated, and experiments aimed to demonstrate their suitability for this unique application have been performed. Design, fabrication and the experimental results as well as any identified inadequacies for future optimisation are reported and discussed in this paper.