Performance Evaluation of a Crystal-Enhanced Collimation System for the LHC

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been constructed at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, Geneva, Switzerland), and recently started up. The LHC beams, currently accelerated to 3.5 TeV, are meant to reach the nominal energy of 7 TeV, and a total stored energy, in nominal conditions, of 360 MJ per beam [1, 2]. The contrast between the huge stored power and the delicate cryogenic environment calls for a sophisticated collimation system [3]. For overcoming the limitations of the actual collimation system, different upgrade solutions have been considered [4, 5, 6]; this Ph.D. work gives a first performance evaluation of a crystal-enhanced collimation system by analytical, experimental and simulation investigations. In this work, two crystal collimation experiments are described: the T980 (Tevatron, Chicago, U.S.) and the UA9 (SPS, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland). The data are analyzed and actual crystal performances are measured. These experimental results and their cross-check with dedicated simulations constitute the foundations of a weighted, critical prediction for the LHC. Different scenarios for a possible LHC crystal-enhanced collimation system have been simulated. Here the results are described and optimal parameters for a possible crystal collimator are proposed.

Impact of high energy high intensity proton beams on targets: Case studies for Super Proton Synchrotron and Large Hadron Collider

Juan Blanco Sancho, Rudiger Schmidt

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is designed to collide two proton beams with unprecedented particle energy of 7 TeV. Each beam comprises 2808 bunches and the separation between two neighboring bunches is 25 ns. The energy stored in each beam is 362 MJ, sufficient to melt 500 kg copper. Safety of operation is very important when working with such powerful beams. An accidental release of even a very small fraction of the beam energy can result in severe damage to the equipment. The machine protection system is essential to handle all types of possible accidental hazards; however, it is important to know about possible consequences of failures. One of the critical failure scenarios is when the entire beam is lost at a single point. In this paper we present detailed numerical simulations of the full impact of one LHC beam on a cylindrical solid carbon target. First, the energy deposition by the protons is calculated with the FLUKA code and this energy deposition is used in the BIG2 code to study the corresponding thermodynamic and the hydrodynamic response of the target that leads to a reduction in the density. The modified density distribution is used in FLUKA to calculate new energy loss distribution and the two codes are thus run iteratively. A suitable iteration step is considered to be the time interval during which the target density along the axis decreases by 15%-20%. Our simulations suggest that the full LHC proton beam penetrates up to 25 m in solid carbon whereas the range of the shower from a single proton in solid carbon is just about 3 m (hydrodynamic tunneling effect). It is planned to perform experiments at the experimental facility HiRadMat (High Radiation Materials) at CERN using the proton beam from the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), to compare experimental results with the theoretical predictions. Therefore simulations of the response of a solid copper cylindrical target hit by the SPS beam were performed. The particle energy in the SPS beam is 440 GeV while it has the same bunch structure as the LHC beam, except that it has only up to 288 bunches. Beam focal spot sizes of sigma = 0.1, 0.2, and 0.5 mm have been considered. The phenomenon of significant hydrodynamic tunneling due to the hydrodynamic effects is also expected for the experiments.

2012

Alignment of the LHCb tracking stations and selection of X(3872) and Z(4430)± in pp collisions at 14 TeV

Louis Nicolas

The LHCb experiment is one of the four large experiments located at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, close to Geneva, Switzerland. The LHCb detector is a single-arm forward spectrometer which is dedicated to precision measurements of CP violation, as well as to the study of rare b-hadron decays. Both the energy at which the proton-proton collisions will take place and the statistics of events that will be selected are unprecedented. The LHCb detector will start its measurements in November 2009 and operate for several years. Being an experiment for precision measurements, LHCb relies on excellent reconstruction and trigger efficiencies, outstanding proper-time and momentum resolutions, as well as on a reliable particle identification, both for the event selection and the flavour tagging of B-meson decays. These performances are however not possible without a precise construction and alignment of the detector. An extensive survey of the detector geometry has been performed. However these measurements, for instance for the Inner Tracker, a silicon-strip tracking device, are only precise to the order of the detector resolution. The first part of the thesis discusses the detector alignment. A software alignment method has been developed in order to improve the knowledge of the detector element position. The novelty of this method is that it uses the tracks from the standard track-fitting procedure, which is based on a Kalman filter, and not on a global track model. The advantage of this method is that it is possible to properly take the multiple Coulomb scattering, the magnetic field and the energy loss corrections into account. It also allows to correctly take into account the correlations between the hits on tracks. This document presents two realistic running scenarios, using simulated data, in which the alignment of the Inner and Outer Trackers (IT and OT) will need to be performed. A general strategy is defined for the alignment in a multi-step manner, starting from a coarse granularity and descending step-by-step to a finer detector granularity. A dedicated track selection is also developed. In particular, an evolving cut on the Χ2 of the track fit is shown to be essential in the alignment procedure. Starting from a misaligned detector, the two scenarios use tracks coming either from beam–gas collisions at an energy of 450 GeV/c without magnetic field, or from proton–proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of √s = 14 TeV and when the magnetic field of the experiment is turned on. It is shown that the alignment software is able to recover from misalignments of the order of 1–2mm with a precision better than 20% of the single-hit resolution for the IT and 5% for the OT, in both scenarios. The precision of this alignment is then validated by studying the mass distributions of reconstructed J/ψ and K0s mesons and by showing that the mass resolution for these particles is not degraded by more than 2% between the ideal case and the case after re-alignment of the detector. In the summer of 2008 and 2009, data were taken at LHCb during LHC synchronisation tests. The alignment of the IT using these high track-multiplicity data is presented in this document. A dedicated pattern recognition and track selection are used in order to obtain a sample of good-quality tracks. The IT is aligned down to the lowest granularity with a precision of 20 µm. This precision is obtained by studying the distributions of unbiased residuals with respect to the reconstructed tracks. It is also shown that the alignment results do not depend on the position of the detector before alignment. The second part of this thesis discusses the first studies at LHCb of the X(3872) and Z(4430)± particles. Six years ago, the Belle collaboration discovered a new state called the X(3872). Several theoretical models have been developed in order to include this state, and the many others discovered since then. On the other hand, several collaborations have repeated the observation of this resonance in several decay modes. However, the nature and the quantum numbers of this state remain uncertain. Belle also discovered a charged state called the Z(4430)±, but this discovery has not been confirmed by any other experiment yet. For both these states, LHCb is expected to play an important role. A Monte Carlo feasibility study of the selections of the X(3872) → J/ψ π+π- decay in the B± → X(3872)K± channel and of the B0 → Z(4430)±K± with Z(4430)± decaying to ψ(2S)π± are presented in this document. A yield of 1'850 reconstructed, selected and triggered B± → X(3872)K± events is obtained per nominal year (corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2 fb-1), for a background-to-signal ratio in the interval [0.3, 3.4] at 90% CL. With such statistics, half a nominal year will be sufficient to disentangle between the two remaining spin hypotheses for the X(3872) state. For the Z(4430)±, an annual yield of 6'200 reconstructed, selected and triggered B0 → Z(4430)K± events is obtained for a B/S ratio within the interval [2.7, 5.3] at 90% CL. Hence, the confirmation or ruling out of the Belle discovery will be possible, even in the early running phase of the LHC proton collider at √s = 7–10 TeV.

EPFL2009

Transverse Noise, Decoherence, and Landau Damping in High-Energy Hadron Colliders

Sondre Vik Furuseth

High-energy hadron colliders are designed to generate particle collisions within specialized detectors. A higher number of collisions is achieved with high-quality beams of low transverse emittances, meaning a small transverse cross-section, and high intensity, meaning many particles per bunch. This thesis studies how noise negatively impacts the beam quality in high-energy hadron colliders, both in terms of beam instabilities and emittance growth. The impact is analyzed through the derivation of new theories, multi-particle tracking simulations, the numerical solving of partial differential equations, and dedicated experiments in CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The impact of noise on beam stability cannot be treated with the first-order, linear Vlasov equation, which is commonly used to study the thresholds of collective instabilities. Therefore, the Vlasov equation has in this thesis been expanded to second order in the perturbation of the beam distribution, finding a diffusion mechanism driven by the interplay between noise, decoherence, and wakefields. The diffusion leads to a local flattening of the distribution, which can cause a loss of Landau damping after a time delay referred to as the latency. An analytical formula for the latency and a specialized numerical diffusion solver were successfully benchmarked against the latency measurements in a dedicated experiment conducted in the LHC. Precaution in the machine operation has to be taken to account for this new mechanism. In particular, it is found that the machine must be operated with a margin to the linear stability threshold. For the case of the LHC, it has previously been found empirically that the octupole current during operation must be increased by about a factor 2, and this thesis provides the explanation as to why that is. Alternative operational settings are suggested to reduce the required octupole current in the LHC. In addition, the new theory allows for extrapolations to future machines, such as the High-Luminosity LHC, as well as the estimation of the impact of new devices, such as crab cavities. External noise and noise from the transverse beam feedback system cause an emittance growth rate due to decoherence of the noise kicks. Analytical theories for the suppression of the emittance growth rate with a bunch-by-bunch feedback have here been extended to a multi-bunch feedback. The numerical study of suppression during collision was conducted by means of a newly developed parallel multi-beam multi-bunch algorithm. For the typical case of low-frequency external noise and non-negligible feedback noise, a multi-bunch feedback has both analytically and numerically been found superior to a bunch-by-bunch feedback, as it can suppress the impact of the external noise equally well, while simultaneously reducing the noise generated by the feedback itself. Suggestions for a more optimal operation of the LHC are discussed, including a reduction of the upper cutoff frequency of the feedback system.

EPFL2021