Beam-transport study of an isocentric rotating ion gantry with minimum number of quadrupoles

A beam-transport study of an isocentric gantry for ion therapy is presented. The gantry is designed with the number of quadrupoles down to the theoretical minimum, which is the feature published for the first time in this paper. This feature has been achieved without compromising the ion-optical functions of the beam-transport system that is capable of handling non-symmetric beams (beams with different emittances in vertical and horizontal plane), pencil-beam scanning, double-achromatic optics and beam-size control. Ion-optical properties of the beam-transport system are described, discussed and illustrated by computer simulations performed by the TRANSPORT-code.