Depth dose characteristics of elongated fields for electron beams from a 20-MeV accelerator

In a Therac-20 linear accelerator, 6-20 MeV electron beams are normally produced by shaping a scanned electron beam through primary x-ray collimators and secondary electron trimmers. The collimator settings range continuously from 2 to 30 cm. Depth dose and field flatness parameters were measured for small elongated fields of the various electron energies. Depth dose of narrow fields defined either by the machine's collimator or lead cutouts agreed with data predicted from small square fields using the "square-root" method.