The Large Hadron Collider and the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN as tools to Generate Warm Dense Matter and Non–Ideal Plasmas

Abstract

The largest accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, has entered into commissioning phase. It is expected that when this impressive machine will become fully operational, it will generate two counter rotating 7 TeV/c proton beams that will be made to collide, leading to an unprecedented luminosity of 10 34 cm −2 s −1 . Total energy stored in each LHC beam is about 362 MJ, sufficient to melt 500 kg copper. Safety of operation is a very critical issue when working with such extremely powerful beams. It is important to know the consequences of an accidental release of the beam energy in order to design protection system for the equipment. For this purpose we have carried out extensive numerical simulations of the interaction of one full LHC beam with copper and graphite targets which are materials of practical importance. Our calculations have shown that the LHC protons will penetrate up to about 35 m in solid copper and 10 m in solid graphite. A very interesting outcome of this work is that the impact of the LHC beam on solid matter will generate Warm Dense Matter (WDM) and Strongly Coupled Plasmas (SCP).The beams for the LHC are pre-accelerated in the SPS (Super Proton Synchrotron) to 450 GeV/c and transferred to LHC via two beam lines. Several SPS cycles are required to fill the LHC, in one cycle a batch with up to 288 bunches can be accelerated. From the safety point of view it is also very important to study the damage caused to the equipment in case of an accident involving an uncontrolled release of the SPS beam. For this purpose we have also carried out detailed numerical simulations of the impact of the full SPS beam on solid copper and tungsten targets. These simulations have shown that the targets are severely damaged by the beam. It is also interesting to note that also in this case, a large part of the target material is converted into WDM and SCP. This study, therefore, shows that the LHC and the SPS have the potential to be used for studying these important fields of research. However, to achieve this goal, it is necessary to advance this work by designing dedicated experiments. This work is in progress.

Numerical simulations of energy deposition caused by 50 MeV—50 TeV proton beams in copper and graphite targets

“…The first time this has been done is for the SSC [10]. In the past few years, some of the worst possible failure scenarios were studied for the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) [11][12][13] and the LHC [14][15][16][17][18] by some of us (Schmidt, Burkart, and Wollmann) together with other collaborators. Hydrodynamic tunneling leads to a remarkable range lengthening of the proton energy deposition.…”