EBG MedAustron, Wr. Neustadt
CERN, Geneva
The LHC beam dump system has to safely dispose all beams in a wide energy range of 450 GeV to 7 TeV. A 3 μs abort gap in the beam structure for the switch-on of the extraction kicker field ideally allows a loss free extraction under normal operating conditions. However, a low number of asynchronous beam aborts is to be expected from reliability calculations and from the first year's operational experience with the beam dump kickers. For such cases, MAD-X simulations including all optics and alignment errors have been performed to determine loss patterns around the LHC as a function of the position of the main protection elements in interaction region six. Special attention was paid to the beam load on the tungsten collimators which protect the triplets in the LHC experimental insertions, and the tracking results compared with semi-analytical numerical estimates. The simulations are also compared to the results of beam commissioning of these protection devices.
CERN, Geneva
DESY, Hamburg
The quality of the injection into the LHC is monitored by a dedicated software system which acquires and analyses the pulse waveforms from the injection kickers, and measures key beam parameters and compares them with the nominal ones. The beam losses at injection are monitored on many critical devices in the injection regions, together with the longitudinal filling pattern and maximum trajectory offset on the first 100 turns. The paper describes the injection quality check system and the results from LHC beam commissioning, in particular the beam losses measured during injection at the various aperture limits. The results are extrapolated to full intensity and the consequences are discussed.
CERN, Geneva
The movable LHC injection protection devices in the SPS to LHC transfer lines and downstream of the injection kicker in the LHC were commissioned with low-intensity beam. The different beam-based alignment measurements used to determine the beam centre and size are described, together with the results of measurements of the transverse beam distribution at large amplitude. The system was set up with beam to its nominal settings and the protection level against various failures was determined by measuring the transmission and transverse distribution into the LHC as a function of oscillation amplitude. Beam losses levels for regular operation were also extrapolated. The results are compared with the expected device settings and protection level, and the implications for LHC operation discussed.
CERN, Geneva
The commissioning of the beam transfer systems for LHC included detailed aperture measurements in the injection regions and for the beam dump systems. The measurements, mainly single pass, were made using systematic scans of different oscillation phases and amplitudes, and the results compared with the expectations from the physical aperture model of the LHC. In this paper the measurements and results are presented and compared with the specified apertures in these critical areas.
SLAC, Menlo Park, California
CERN, Geneva
KIT, Karlsruhe
A current issue with the LHC collimation system is single-diffractive, off-energy protons from the primary collimators that pass completely through the secondary collimation system and are absorbed immediately downbeam in the cold magnets of the dispersion suppression section. Simulations suggest that the high impact rate could result in quenching of these magnets. We have studied replacing the 60 cm primary graphite collimators, which remove halo mainly by inelastic strong interactions, with 5.25 mm tungsten, which remove halo mainly by multiple coulomb scattering and thereby reduce the rate of single-diffractive interactions which cause losses in the dispersion suppressor.
CERN, Geneva
IHEP Protvino, Protvino, Moscow Region
TRIUMF, Vancouver
The LHC has two dedicated cleaning insertions: IR3 for momentum cleaning and IR7 for betatron cleaning. The collimation system has been specified and built with tight mechanical tolerances (e.g. jaw flatness ~ 40 μm) and is designed to achieve a high accuracy and reproducibility of the jaw positions. The practically achievable cleaning efficiency of the present Phase-I system depends on the precision of the jaw centering around the beam, the accuracy of the gap size and the jaw parallelism against the beam. The reproducibility and stability of the system is important to avoid the frequent repetition of beam based alignment which is currently a lengthy procedure. Within this paper we describe the method used for the beam based alignment of the LHC collimation system, its achieved accuracy and stability and its performance at 450GeV.
CERN, Geneva
Beam physics considerations for the stripping foil of the 160 MeV PSB H- injection system are described, including the arguments for the foil type, thickness, geometry and positioning. The foil performance considerations are described, including expected stripping efficiency, emittance growth, energy straggling, temperature and lifetime. The different beam loss mechanisms are quantified in the context of the aperture limits, operational considerations and collimation requirements.