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Page 52


www.us-tech.com


Partnering June, 2018


Over 140 Spectrum Instrumentation Digitizers Protect Large Hadron Collider


By Oliver Rovini, CTO, Spectrum Instrumentation


protection systems of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The cards are used to check that the particle beams have been accurately deflected. Incredible precision is re- quired for this, as two high-energy particle beams travel at close to the speed of light in opposite directions around the 16.8 mi (27 km) LHC ac- celerator ring. They are then made to collide at four locations around the ring for runs of several hours. The particles are so tiny that the task of making them collide is akin to firing


O


ver 140 digitizer cards from Spectrum Instrumentation are being used in the machine


two needles 6.2 mi (10 km) apart with such precision that they meet halfway. The energy stored in the two


beams is so high that in the case of loss of control of the beams, the LHC could suffer serious damage. To safe- ly dispose of the beams in the case of an emergency, or at the end of a col- lision run, the LHC Beam Dumping System (LBDS) must extract the full beams from the LHC in one revolu- tion and transport them to an ab- sorber block located about half a mile from the rings. After every beam dump, post- operation check systems make sure


that all elements within the LBDS performed correctly.


Checking the Kicker Magnets A key process is to check that


the fast-pulsed magnets, called kick- er magnets, have accurately deflect- ed the particle beams from the LHC rings to the extraction lines. Digitiz- er cards are used to capture the cur- rent pulse waveforms to check that they had the correct shape and were synchronized with the beam. The LBDS extraction magnet


current pulses are about 20 kA with rise times of less than 3 µs and a syn- chronization error less than 20 ns. At LBDS alone, for every beam dump event, nearly 500 analog signals are acquired using digitizer cards and more than 150 synchronization signals are captured using digital I/O cards. “We have developed our own


waveform acquisition and analysis framework called Internal Post Oper- ation Check (IPOC),” explains Nicolas Magnin, software team leader for the accelerator beam transfer group at CERN. “It is programmed using C++ on Linux and includes a hardware ab- straction layer that enables us to in- terface with many types of digitizer cards. We use a variety of digitizer cards from Spectrum to cover a range of kicker magnets used for all the CERN accelerators that have differ- ent bandwidth and dynamic require- ments. This variety of cards enables us to cover a bandwidth range from 10 to 500 MS/s and a resolution from 8 to 16 bits depending on the application.”


Precision Required The measurements of these kick-


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schleuniger-na.com/cst_us To Be Precise.


er pulse events requires a very high level of precision. The most demand- ing systems require a pulse-to-pulse reproducibility error for the delay of less than 10 ns, and for the amplitude of lower than 0.5 percent within a dy- namic range of 16. To achieve this, the precision of the acquisition has to be even greater by an order of magnitude, hence the choice, for instance, of a Spectrum Instrumentation M4i.4451- x8 digitizer with a time resolution of 2 ns and an effective number of bits (ENOB) larger than 10. As the kicker current signal dynamic is not fixed, the various input ranges of the digitiz- er are used to optimize the signal-to- noise ratio of the acquired waveform. Almost all waveforms are saved


in a logging database for later analy- sis. Also, all waveform analysis re- sults, such as delay, length, rise time, fall time, and flat top ampli- tude, are stored in the logging data- base to extract trends over time to


check system stability, temperature dependency, etc. “We chose Spectrum Instru-


mentation products because they provide excellent quality at a very competitive price,” adds Magnin. “They are very simple to set up with user-friendly software tools, and the driver sources are easy to compile and deploy in our Linux operational environment. I particularly appreci- ate the documentation and coding ex- amples that are provided, which make it easy to get started.”


The task of making particles collide is like


firing two needles over six miles apart and making them meet in the air halfway.


CERN has bought a number of


Spectrum Instrumentation cards over the past eight years and has re- ported only a few issues with out-of- warranty cards that Spectrum re- paired and returned quickly. The company’s support team was also quick with answers to questions dur- ing the development phases. CERN also uses Spectrum’s ar-


bitrary waveform generator (AWG) cards to simulate kicker current waveforms and digital pattern gener- ators cards to send timing and con- trol signals, helping to develop and validate surveillance and protection systems on its test benches. The re- search facility also uses LabVIEW in Windows for some test benches, as Spectrum hardware is directly com- patible with this environment. “CERN’s use of our digitizer


cards is a typical example of our cus- tomers,” says Gisela Hassler, Spec- trum’s CEO. “Major research institu- tions, universities and multinational R&D departments choose our prod- ucts, because of their quality. Their projects often run over many years so they want equipment that they can rely on for these long periods. We have many products still in active use that are over ten years old. This is also why we introduced our five-year warranty to provide peace of mind for people de- signing and running experiments over


a number of years.” Contact: Spectrum Instrumen-


tation Corp., 15 Warren Street, Suite 25, Hackensack, NJ 07601 % 201-562-1999 fax: 201-342-7598 E-mail: sales@spectrum-instrumen- tation.com Web: www.spectrum-instrumenta- tion.com r


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