Applications of nuclear physics are not limited to energy production. Nuclear physics can be applied in many different fields and the main goal of this course is to present examples of applications outside the electronuclear field.
Radiation can be used in medicine. Depending on the type of radiations, they can escape the body with minimal impact allowing imaging to be done or interact strongly and release energy that can destroy cancer cells. Whereas radiology focuses mainly on the use of x-rays, two other medical specialties use radiations. Nuclear medicine that uses open sources of radionuclides for imaging or therapy and radiotherapy that uses external beams of different types, have made many great progresses these last years:
• In nuclear medicine, two radiopharmaceuticals based on lutecium-177 have been approved by the US-FDA and EMA and are now used in clinical routine for, respectively, the treatment of neuroendocrine tumors and prostate cancers. This has launched a great interest of almost all pharmaceutical compagnies that have now radiopharmaceuticals products in their pipelines. Nuclear medicine offers also the perfect tools for personalized treatment through a new paradigm called theranostics. By changing radionuclides, it is possible to get a biodistribution of the product to select patients that will respond to the treatment and adjust the injected activity. With this approach, what you see is what you treat.
• In radiotherapy, ultra-high dose rate therapy, also called Flash therapy (~40 Gy/s), is showing a great potential as it has been demonstrated in preclinical experiments using different type of projectiles a protective effect on healthy tissues with identical impact on cancer tissues than conventional radiotherapy (0.01 Gy/s). In addition to this new method, spatial fractionation also showed interesting results in minimizing the impact on healthy tissues. Finally, alpha beam shows a renewing interest in the radiotherapy community with several centers soon able to use this beam for radiotherapy research (Archade in Caen, CNAO in Italy …).
Radiations are also commonly used in non-destructive analysis where ion beam analysis (IBA) offer different techniques to explore in depth samples with no or minimal preparation. They are mainly used in industry where X-rays or gamma rays can help, for example, getting images to ensure the quality of a weld, identifying a blockage in a pipe or insure the filling of a soft drink can in a filling line. IBA techniques are also used in research to study thin material layers in material through Rutherford backscattering (RBS) or get information on an archeological sample using particle induced X-ray emission (PIXE).
Finally, radiation damage is essential for electronics in particular those intended to be used in particle physics experiments or in spacecraft. It is then mandatory to test designs and robustness before installing them as in most cases they can not be replaced after being installed.