The ARDENT Marie Curie ITN project provides research and training opportunities for 15 Early Stage Researchers (ESR's) located at 8 institutes spread across Europe.

We develop advanced instrumentation for:

• Radiation dosimetry in mixed radiation fields.
• Monitoring clinical ion beams used in cancer therapy.
• Monitoring the stray radiation produced by medical, commercial and research accelerators.

The overall aim of ARDENT is to offer the ESR's extensive training opportunities focused on the development and testing of instrumentation based on advanced technologies for measuring energy distributions and dosimetric quantities in complex radiation fields as well as in monoenergetic particle beams used in cancer therapy.

ARDENT aims at a research and training programme centred on the development of advanced instrumentation for radiation monitoring. We focus on three main technologies:

• Gas detectors: Gas Electron Multipliers (GEM) and Tissue Equivalent Proportional Counters (TEPC).
• Solid state detectors: Medipix, silicon microdosimeters.
• Track detector techniques: CR-39, nanodosimeters.

The program addresses the potential uses of a class of instruments based on the above technologies with the three main objectives:

• Disentangle the various components of the radiation field and determine the dosimetric quantities due to each component.
• Measure the radiation quality of the radiation field (micro- and nano-dosimetry).
• Obtain information on the energy distribution of the various components of the radiation field (photon and neutron spectrometry).

The applications of this instrumentation lie in:

• The characterization of stray radiation fields around a wide range of particle accelerators (electron, proton and ion machines), which are extensively used in fundamental research.
• The characterization of stray radiation fields for the industrial and medical fields - mainly for radionuclide production and cancer radiation therapy.
• The characterization of the mixed radiation fields on board commercial flights and in space
• The assessment of the undesirable secondary doses delivered to patients undergoing radiation therapy (due to stray photons and to neutron radiation outside the treatment field). This is a very important issue due to the improved techniques that have become available in recent years with both conventional radiotherapy and hadron therapy with protons and carbon ions
• The measurement of the properties of clinical hadron beams now being used in cancer therapy (transverse beam profile, depth dose distributions, field homogeneity, fragmentation of carbon ions, etc)