Towards Laser Driven Hadron Cancer Radiotherapy: A Review of Progress

It has been known for about sixty years that proton and heavy ion
therapy is a very powerful radiation procedure for treating tumors.
It has an innate ability to irradiate tumors with greater doses and
spatial selectivity compared with electron and photon therapy and,
hence, is a tissue sparing procedure. For more than twenty years,
powerful lasers have generated high energy beams of protons and
heavy ions and it has, therefore, frequently been speculated that
lasers could be used as an alternative to radiofrequency (RF)
accelerators to produce the particle beams necessary for cancer
therapy. The present paper reviews the progress made towards laser
driven hadron cancer therapy and what has still to be accomplished
to realize its inherent enormous potential.