CERN, Geneva
The diamond beam monitor is a solid-state ionization chamber that stands out due to its fast and efficient charge collection and its high radiation tolerance. The diamond technology gives a charge collection time of less than 1 ns and lifetime studies made at CERN with 24 GeV protons showed a decrease in performance of only 50% at 10 MGy, which make this device particularly well adapted to applications in particle accelerators. A poly-crystalline CVD diamond beam monitor has been evaluated as a beam halo loss monitor for the CERN LHC accelerator. Despite the read-out being made through 250 m of cable, the tests showed a good signal-to-noise ratio of 6.8, an excellent double-pulse resolution of less than 5 ns and a high dynamic range basically unlimited except by the electronics. A single-crystalline CVD diamond beam monitor was built and tested in cooperation with Bergoz Instrumentation for ISOLDE at CERN for the HIE-REX upgrade. This device was used to measure the beam intensity for particle counting and for measuring the beam energy spectrum. An energy resolution of 0.6% and a time resolution of 39 ps were measured for a carbon ion energy of 22.8 MeV.
