Hadron and proton therapy are cutting edge techniques for cancer treatment and a great development of specialized medical centers and research facilities is foreseen in the next decades. One of the main obstacles to the penetration of the use of charged particles for therapy is the construction of complex and expensive accelerating structures and rotating transfer lines, i.e. gantries, able to bend and focus the beam down to the patient. GaToroid is a novel concept of a fixed toroidal gantry, able to deliver the dose at discrete angles in the whole range of treatment energies in steady-state configuration. The steady-state current and magnetic field are appealing features, implying simplified demands on stability, powering, mechanics and cooling, as well as for the clinical perspective, allowing rapid variations of beam energy and treatment angle. In this work, we present the magnetic design of the toroidal coils composing the first instance of GaToroid, focusing the analysis on an option for a proton machine with an energy range of 70 MeV to 250 MeV. To create a proper magnetic field distribution, the coils have been designed with peculiar asymmetric shape and the windings have been graded. An initial winding geometry was obtained with an optimization aiming at maximum energy acceptance of the gantry. We are now progressing to the detailed engineering design. We describe here the overall magnet design, coil and conductor layout (LTS and HTS options), and mechanical studies involving the general torus structure. Quench protection is evaluated for LTS (Nb-Ti) configuration, as well as more innovative HTS (ReBCO) options. Finally, we present the design and the construction of a scaled-down demonstrator, intended as the proof of principle of winding procedure and mechanical coil structure.

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Next generation ion therapy magnets both for gantry and for accelerator (synchrotron) are under investigation in a recently launched European collaboration that, in the frame of the European H2020 HITRIplus and I.FAST programmes, has obtained some funding for work packages on superconducting magnets. Design and technology of superconducting magnets will be developed for ion therapy synchrotron and -especially-gantry, taking as reference beams of 430 MeV/nucleon ions (C-ions) with 10 10 ions/pulse. The magnets are about 60-90 mm diameter, 4 to 5 T peak field with a field change of about 0.3 T/s and good field quality. The paper will illustrate the organization of the collaboration and the technical program. Various superconductor options (LTS, MgB2 or HTS) and different magnet shapes, like classical CosTheta or innovative Canted CosTheta (CCT), with curved multifunction (dipole and quadrupole), are under evaluation, CCT being the baseline. These studies should provide design inputs for a new superconducting gantry design for existing facilities and, on a longer time scale, for a brand-new hadron therapy centre to be placed in the South East Europe (SEEIIST project).

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is being prepared for its full energy exploitation during run III, i.e., an increase of the beam energy beyond the present 6.5 TeV, targeting the maximum discovery potential attainable. This requires an increase of the operating field of the superconducting dipole and quadrupole magnets, which in turn will result in more demanding working conditions due to a reduction of the operating margin while the energy deposited by particle loss will increase. Beam-induced magnet quenches, i.e., the transition to normal conducting state, will become an increasing concern, because they could affect the availability of the LHC. It is hence very important to understand and be able to predict the quench levels of the main LHC magnets for the required values of current and generated magnetic fields. This information will be used to set accurate operating limits of beam loss, with sufficient but not excessive margin, so to achieve maximal beam delivery to the experiments. In this study we used a one-dimensional, multistrand thermal-electric model to analyze the maximum beam losses that can be sustained by the LHC magnets, still remaining superconducting. The heat deposition distribution due to the beam losses is given as an input for the stability analysis. Critical elements of the model are the ability to capture heat and current distribution among strands, and heat transfer to the superfluid helium bath. The computational model has been benchmarked against energy densities reconstructed from beam-induced main dipole quenches during LHC operation at 6.5 TeV. The model was then used to evaluate the stability margin of both main dipole and main quadrupole magnets at different beam energies, up to the expected ultimate operating energy of the LHC, 7.5 TeV. The comparison between the quench levels underlines how the increase of beam energy implies a substantial reduction of magnets stability and will require much stricter setting on the allowable beam losses to avoid resistive transitions during operation.