The theme of this volume, “Medical Applications of Accelerators”, is of enormous importance to human health and has a deep impact on our society.The invention of particle accelerators in the early 20th century created a whole new world for producing energetic X-rays, electrons, protons, neutrons and other particle beams. Immediately these beams found revolutionary applications in medicine. There are two important yet distinct medical applications. One is that accelerators produce radioisotopes for various nuclear medicines for millions of patients each year. The other is that accelerators produce particle beams for radiation therapy for the treatment of cancer. The particle beams can be X-rays (generated by high-energy electrons), protons, neutrons or heavy ions such as carbon. Today there are more than 5,000 accelerators routinely used in hospitals all over the world for nuclear medicine and cancer therapy. The great potential of accelerator applications in medicine can hardly be exaggerated.This volume contains 14 articles, all written by distinguished scholars.

Physical and biological basis of proton and of carbon ion radiation therapy and clinical outcome data / Herman Suit, Thomas F. Delaney and Alexei Trofimov -- The production of radionuclides for radiotracers in nuclear medicine / Thomas J. Ruth -- Proton radiation therapy in the hospital environment : conception, development, and operation of the initial hospital-based facility / James M. Slater, Jerry D. Slater and Andrew J. Wroe -- Microwave electron linacs for oncology / David H. Whittum -- Heavy-particle radiotherapy : system design and application / H. Tsujii, S. Minohara and K. Noda -- High frequency linacs for hadrontherapy / Ugo Amaldi, Saverio Braccini and Paolo Puggioni -- Medical cyclotrons / D.L. Friesel and T.A. Antaya -- Synchrotrons for hadrontherapy / Marco G. Pullia -- Beam delivery systems for particle radiation therapy : current status and recent developments / J.M. Schippers -- Laser acceleration of ions for radiation therapy / Toshiki Tajima, Dietrich Habs and Xueqing Yan -- FFAGs as accelerators and beam delivery devices for ion cancer therapy / Dejan Trbojevic -- The dielectric wall accelerator / George J. Caporaso, Yu-Jiuan Chen and Stephen E. Sampayan -- The supercollider : the Texas days - a personal recollection of its short life and demise / Stanley Wojcicki -- A man for all seasons : Robert R. Wilson / Edwin L. Goldwasser

As accelerator science and technology progressed over the past several decades, the accelerators themselves have undergone major improvements in multiple performance factors: beam energy, beam power, and beam brightness. As a consequence, accelerators have found applications in a wide range of fields in our life and in our society. The current volume is dedicated to applications in energy and security, two of the most important and urgent topics in today's world.This volume makes an effort to provide a review as complete and up to date as possible of this broad and challenging subject. It contains overviews on each of the two topics and a series of articles for in-depth discussions including heavy ion accelerator driven inertial fusion, linear accelerator-based ADS systems, circular accelerator-based ADS systems, accelerator-reactor interface, accelerators for fusion material testing, cargo inspection, proton radiography, compact neutron generators and detectors. It also has a review article on accelerator science and technology in Canada with a focus on the TRIUMF laboratory, and an article on the life of Bruno Touschek, a renowned accelerator physicist.

Particle accelerators are a major invention of the 20th century. In the last eight decades, they have evolved enormously and have fundamentally changed the way we live, think and work. Accelerators are the most powerful microscopes for viewing the tiniest inner structure of cells, genes, molecules, atoms and their constituents such as protons, neutrons, electrons, neutrinos and quarks. This opens up a whole new world for materials science, chemistry and molecular biology. Accelerators with megawatt beam power may ultimately solve a critical problem faced by our society, namely, the treatment of nuclear waste and the supply of an alternative type of energy. There are also tens of thousands of small accelerators all over the world. They are used every day for medical imaging, cancer therapy, radioisotope production, high-density chip-making, mass spectrometry, cargo x-ray/gamma-ray imaging, detection of explosives and illicit drugs, and weapons. This volume provides a comprehensive review of this driving and fascinating field

Particle accelerators are a major invention of the 20th century. In the last eight decades,they have evolved enormously and have fundamentally changed the way we live, think and work.Accelerators are the most powerful microscopes for viewing the tiniest inner structure of cells, genes, molecules, atoms and their constituents such as protons, neutrons, electrons, neutrinos and quarks. This opens up a whole new world for materials science, chemistry and molecular biology. Accelerators with megawatt beam power may ultimately solve a critical problem faced by our society, namely, the treatment of nuclear waste and the supply of an alternative type of energy.There are also tens of thousands of small accelerators all over the world. They are used every day for medical imaging, cancer therapy, radioisotope production, high-density chip-making, mass spectrometry, cargo x-ray/gamma-ray imaging, detection of explosives and illicit drugs, and weapons. This volume provides a comprehensive review of this driving and fascinating field.The poster (also available in 1118 x 406 mm size) which illustrates the history and development of particle accelerators from 1919 to the future can be purchased separately.

The idea of colliding two particle beams to fully exploit the energy of accelerated particles was first proposed by Rolf Wideröe, who in 1943 applied for a patent on the collider concept and was awarded the patent in 1953. The first three colliders — AdA in Italy, CBX in the US, and VEP-1 in the then Soviet Union — came to operation about 50 years ago in the mid-1960s. A number of other colliders followed.Over the past decades, colliders defined the energy frontier in particle physics. Different types of colliers — proton-proton, proton-antiproton, electron-positron, electron-proton, electron-ion and ion-ion colliders — have played complementary roles in fully mapping out the constituents and forces in the Standard Model (SM). We are now at a point where all predicted SM constituents of matter and forces have been found, and all the latest ones were found at colliders. Colliders also play a critical role in advancing beam physics, accelerator research and technology development. It is timely that RAST Volume 7 is dedicated to Colliders.

Each generation yielded growths in brightness and time resolution that were unimaginable just a few years earlier. In particular, the progression from the 3rd to 4th generation is a true revolution; the peak brilliance of coherent soft and hard x-rays has increased by 7-10 orders of magnitude, and the image resolution has reached the angstrom (1 [symbol] = 10-10 meters) and femto-second (1 fs = 10-15 second) scales. These impressive capabilities have fostered fundamental scientific advances and led to an explosion of numerous possibilities in many important research areas including material science, chemistry, molecular biology and the life sciences. Even more remarkably, this field of photon source invention and development shows no signs of slowing down. Studies have already been started on the next generation of x-ray sources, which would have a time resolution in the atto-second (1 as = 10-18 second) regime, comparable to the time of electron motion inside atoms.