The main direction proposed by the community of experts in the field of laser-driven ion acceleration is to improve particle beam features (maximum energy, charge, emittance, divergence, monochromaticity, shot-to-shot stability) in order to demonstrate reliable and compact approaches to be used for multidisciplinary applications, thus, in principle, reducing the overall cost of a laser-based facility compared to a conventional accelerator one and, at the same time, demonstrating innovative and more effective sample irradiation geometries. The mission of the laser-driven ion target area at ELI-Beamlines (Extreme Light Infrastructure) in Dolní Břežany, Czech Republic, called ELI Multidisciplinary Applications of laser-Ion Acceleration (ELIMAIA) , is to provide stable, fully characterized and tuneable beams of particles accelerated by Petawatt-class lasers and to offer them to the user community for multidisciplinary applications. The ELIMAIA beamline has been

The Time-of-Flight (ToF) technique coupled with semiconductor-like detectors, as silicon carbide and diamond, is one of the most promising diagnostic methods for high-energy, high repetition rate, laser-accelerated ions allowing a full on-line beam spectral characterization. A new analysis method for reconstructing the energy spectrum of high-energy laser-driven ion beams from TOF signals is hereby presented and discussed. The proposed method takes into account the detector's working principle, through the accurate calculation of the energy loss in the detector active layer, using Monte Carlo simulations. The analysis method was validated against well-established diagnostics, such as the Thomson Parabola Spectrometer, during an experimental campaign carried out at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL, UK) with the high-energy laser-driven protons accelerated by the VULCAN Petawatt laser.

This is the author's final version of the contribution published as: a b s t r a c t A growing interest of the scientific community towards multidisciplinary applications of laser-driven beams has led to the development of several projects aiming to demonstrate the possible use of these beams for therapeutic purposes. Nevertheless, laser-accelerated particles differ from the conventional beams typically used for multiscipilinary and medical applications, due to the wide energy spread, the angular divergence and the extremely intense pulses. The peculiarities of optically accelerated beams led to develop new strategies and advanced techniques for transport, diagnostics and dosimetry of the accelerated particles. In this framework, the realization of the ELIMED (ELI-Beamlines MEDical and multidisciplinary applications) beamline, developed by INFN-LNS (Catania, Italy) and that will be installed in 2017 as a part of the ELIMAIA beamline at the ELI-Beamlines (Extreme Light Infrastructure Beamlines) facility in Prague, has the aim to investigate the feasibility of using laser-driven ion beams for multidisciplinary applications. In this contribution, an overview of the beamline along with a detailed description of the main transport elements as well as the detectors composing the final section of the beamline will be presented.

The CATANA proton therapy center was the first Italian clinical facility making use of energetic (62 MeV) proton beams for the radioactive treatment of solid tumors. Since the date of the first patient treatment in 2002, 294 patients have been successful treated whose majority was affected by choroidal and iris melanomas. In this paper, we report on the current clinical and physical status of the CATANA facility describing the last dosimetric studies and reporting on the last patient follow-up results. The last part of the paper is dedicated to the description of the INFN-LNS ongoing activities on the realization of a beamline for the transport of laser-accelerated ion beams for future applications. The ELIMED (ELI-Beamlines MEDical and multidisciplinary applications) project is introduced and the main scientific aspects will be described.