Monte Carlo Modeling of Crystal Channeling at High Energies

Charged particles entering a crystal close to some preferred direction can be trapped in the electromagnetic potential well existing between consecutive planes or strings of atoms. This channeling effect can be used to extract beam particles if the crystal is bent beforehand. Crystal channeling is becoming a reliable and efficient technique for collimating beams and removing halo particles. At the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the installation of silicon crystals in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is under scrutiny by the UA9 collaboration with the goal of investigating if they are a viable option for the collimation system upgrade. This thesis describes a new Monte Carlo model of planar channeling which has been developed from scratch in order to be implemented in the FLUKA code simulating particle transport and interactions. Crystal channels are described through the concept of continuous potential taking into account thermal motion of the lattice atoms and using Moliere screening function. The energy of the particle transverse motion determines whether or not it is trapped between the crystal planes while single Coulomb scattering on lattice atoms can lead to dechanneling. The volume capture and reflection applying to quasi-channeled particles are also modeled. Analogously to dechanneling, single scattering is used to determine the occurrence of volume capture. The parameters of the crystals, such as torsion or miscut, are described as well. For channeled particles, the suppression of electromagnetic and nuclear collisions is implemented. It is stronger for particles oscillating close to the center of the channel and is crucial for a correct evaluation of the rate of dechanneling without having recourse to the use of a macroscopic dechanneling length. The UA9-H8 experiment conducted at CERN aims at investigating new crystal physics as well as characterizing crystals that can be of interest in view of the implementation of crystal collimation at CERN, including in the LHC. This experiment uses silicon strip detectors situated on both sides of the crystal. Putting together upstream and downstream tracks in coincidence and matching at an identical fitted location on the crystal, it yields information about the deflections given to the beam population. Several runs from the UA9-H8 experiment are analyzed and compared to the model results. Channeling and dechanneling rates, as well as angular distributions at crystal exit are shown to be in a very encouraging agreement both for strip and quasi-mosaic crystals.

Monte Carlo modeling of crystal channeling at high energies

Francesco Cerutti, Alessio Ferrari, Philippe Jean Schoofs

Channeling in bent crystals is becoming a reliable and efficient technique for collimating beams. At CERN, the installation of crystals in LHC is under scrutiny by the UA9 collaboration with the goal of investigating if they are a viable option for the collimation system upgrade. This paper describes a new model of channeling in bent crystals which has been developed from scratch in order to be implemented in the FLUKA Monte Carlo code simulating particle transport and interactions. Crystal channels are described through the concept of continuous potential taking into account thermal motion of atoms in crystal lattice. The energy of the particle transverse motion determines whether or not it is channeled while single scattering on lattice atoms can lead to dechanneling. Volume capture and reflection are also modeled, as well as crystal torsion and miscut angle. Data from experimental runs conducted at CERN was analyzed and is shown to be in good agreement with the simulation results. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Elsevier2013

New Capabilities of the FLUKA Multi-Purpose Code

Francesco Cerutti, Nikolaos Charitonidis, André Donadon Servelle, Philippe Jean Schoofs

FLUKA is a general purpose Monte Carlo code able to describe the transport and interaction of any particle and nucleus type in complex geometries over an energy range extending from thermal neutrons to ultrarelativistic hadron collisions. It has many different applications in accelerator design, detector studies, dosimetry, radiation protection, medical physics, and space research. In 2019, CERN and INFN, as FLUKA copyright holders, together decided to end their formal collaboration framework, allowing them henceforth to pursue different pathways aimed at meeting the evolving requirements of the FLUKA user community, and at ensuring the long term sustainability of the code. To this end, CERN set up the FLUKA.CERN Collaboration (1) . This paper illustrates the physics processes that have been newly released or are currently implemented in the code distributed by the FLUKA.CERN Collaboration (2) under new licensing conditions that are meant to further facilitate access to the code, as well as intercomparisons. The description of coherent effects experienced by high energy hadron beams in crystal devices, relevant to promising beam manipulation techniques, and the charged particle tracking in vacuum regions subject to an electric field, overcoming a former lack, have already been made available to the users. Other features, namely the different kinds of low energy deuteron interactions as well as the synchrotron radiation emission in the course of charged particle transport in vacuum regions subject to magnetic fields, are currently undergoing systematic testing and benchmarking prior to release. FLUKA is widely used to evaluate radiobiological effects, with the powerful support of the Flair graphical interface, whose new generation (Available at http://flair.cem) offers now additional capabilities, e.g., advanced 3D visualization with photorealistic rendering and support for industry-standard volume visualization of medical phantoms. FLUKA has also been playing an extensive role in the characterization of radiation environments in which electronics operate. In parallel, it has been used to evaluate the response of electronics to a variety of conditions not included in radiation testing guidelines and standards for space and accelerators, and not accessible through conventional ground level testing. Instructive results have been obtained from Single Event Effects (SEE) simulations and benchmarks, when possible, for various radiation types and energies. The code has reached a high level of maturity, from which the FLUKA.CERN Collaboration is planning a substantial evolution of its present architecture. Moving towards a modern programming language allows to overcome fundamental constraints that limited development options. Our long term goal, in addition to improving and extending its physics performances with even more rigorous scientific oversight, is to modernize its structure to integrate independent contributions more easily and to formalize quality assurance through state-of-the-art software deployment techniques. This includes a continuous integration pipeline to automatically validate the codebase as well as automatic processing and analysis of a tailored physics-case test suite. With regard to the aforementioned objectives, several paths are currently envisaged, like finding synergies with Geant4, both at the core structure and interface level, this way offering the user the possibility to run with the same input different Monte Carlo codes and crosscheck the results.

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2022

Beam Transfer Function measurements and transverse beam stability studies for the Large Hadron Collider and its High Luminosity upgrade

Claudia Tambasco

The motion of high energetic particle beams in accelerators is influenced by their interactions with the accelerator environment through electromagnetic fields induced by the particle passages. Traveling with a speed close to the speed of light, the particles induce image charge and currents in the surroundings generating wake-fields that act back on the beams. Destabilizing effects may arise from the coupled motion between the circulating particles and the induced wake fields compromising the accelerator performances. The stability of the beams is ensured by the Landau damping of coherent motions generated by the diversity of oscillation frequencies of the particles in the beams. Under the effect of non linear forces produced by machine non linearities or beam-beam interactions the particles oscillate with slightly different frequencies depending on their amplitudes in the beams (tune spread). At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) transverse instability thresholds are evaluated via the computation of the dispersion integral that depends on the tune spread in the beams as well as on the particle distribution. A large tune spread is beneficial for the Landau damping as long as no diffusive mechanism is present. In the presence of diffusive mechanisms, caused by resonance excitations or noise, the stability diagram can be deformed due to the modification of the particle distribution inside the beam leading to a possible lack of Landau damping of the impedance coherent modes previously damped by lying within the unperturbed stability area. This work aims to experimentally explore the transverse stability of the beams by means of Beam Transfer Function measurements at the LHC. They provide direct measurements of the stability diagrams and are sensitive to particle distribution changes. First measurements of the Landau stability diagrams at the LHC are presented and compared to model expectations. Experimental studies have been carried out in the presence of different sources of non linear effects such as octupole magnets and beam-beam interactions and compared to the model expectations. Limitations deriving from transverse coherent instabilities in the LHC are analysed and possible explanations for the observed LHC instabilities are discussed. In the perspective of the High-Luminosity LHC upgrade (HL-LHC), transverse stability studies for different beam-beam interactions and machine configurations are presented together with possible solutions to compensate reductions of the Landau damping during the operational phases of the HL-LHC.