A FEASIBILITY EXPERIMENT OF A W-POWDER TARGET IN THE HIRADMAT FACILITY AT CERN

Granular solid targets made of fluidized tungsten powder or a static pebble bed of tungsten spheres, have been proposed and are being studied as an alternative configuration for high-power (>1MW of beam power) target systems, suitable for a future Super Beam or Neutrino Factory. Due to the lack of experimental data on this field, a feasibility experiment was performed in HiRadMat facility of CERN to address the effect of the impact of the SPS beam (440 GeV/c) on a static tungsten powder target. Online instrumentation such as high-speed photography and laser-Doppler vibrometry was employed. Preliminary results show a powder disruption speed of less than 0.6 m/s at 3 1011 protons/pulse while the disruption speed appears to scale with the beam intensity.