The radiation environment encountered at high-energy hadron accelerators strongly differs from the environment relevant for space applications. The mixed-field expected at modern accelerators is composed of charged and neutral hadrons (protons, pions, kaons and neutrons), photons, electrons, positrons and muons, ranging from very low (thermal) energies up to the TeV range. This complex field, which is extensively simulated by Monte Carlo codes (e.g. FLUKA) is due to beam losses in the experimental areas, distributed along the machine (e.g. collimation points) and deriving from the interaction with the residual gas inside the beam pipe. The resulting intensity, energy distribution and proportion of the different particles largely depends on the distance and angle with respect to the interaction point as well as the amount of installed shielding material. Electronics operating in the vicinity of the accelerator will therefore be subject to both cumulative damage from radiation (total ionizing dose, displacement damage) as well as single event effects which can seriously compromise the operation of the machine. This, combined with the extensive use of commercial-off-the-shelf components due to budget, performance and availability reasons, results in the need to carefully characterize the response of the devices and systems to representative radiation conditions.
Crab cavities (CCs) constitute a key component of the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) project. In case of a failure, they can induce significant transverse beam offsets within tens of microseconds, necessitating a fast removal of the circulating beam to avoid damage to accelerator components due to losses from the displaced beam halo. In preparation for the final design to be employed in the LHC, a series of tests were conducted on prototype crab cavities installed in the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) at CERN. This paper summarizes the machine protection requirements and observations during the first tests of crab cavities with proton beams in the SPS. In addition, the machine protection implications for future SPS tests and for the use of such equipment in the HL-LHC are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.