Medicine · In service today
Particle therapy
A superconducting gantry brought a heavy-ion treatment room from 600 tonnes down to about 300.
The record behind particle therapy
A compact superconducting rotating gantry · NIRSSuperconductors in particle therapy
Treating a tumor with carbon ions means bending a beam far stiffer than a proton beam, and rotating the whole bending system around the patient so the dose can be delivered from any angle. With resistive magnets that rotating structure is a building. Superconducting magnets bend harder in less space, and the gantry becomes a machine that fits into a hospital rather than a hospital built around a machine. The mass figure is the argument: it is not a performance number, it is a construction-budget number.
What is stopping particle therapy
A gantry magnet is ramped and rotated, not parked. That means changing fields and mechanical cycling, inside a cryostat that has to keep working while it turns. It is a much harder problem than a magnet charged once and left alone. It is also the reason a gantry of this kind is still rare while the superconducting magnet next door in radiology is not.
What a better material would change for particle therapy
The gantry shrinks with the field, and the field is the conductor. A winding that held its current at a temperature the cryostat could reach with less machinery would bring the rotating mass down again, and the number of hospitals that can consider carbon-ion therapy is close to a direct function of that mass.
Conductors used in particle therapy
Near particle therapy, in medicine
SuperMatics is a platform infrastructure company for superconducting devices: software that finds the material and the process, lab work that makes and measures it, and pilot manufacturing with industrial partners.If you are working on something in this field and a material is what stands in the way, tell us about it.