Test & measurement
Fast-tracking innovation from LHC into industry
Professor Carsten Welsch, head of the Department of Physics at the University of Liverpool and a senior academic at the Cockcroft Institute, believes that technologies being developed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have excellent potential to translate into medical and industrial applications. In this article, we find out more about these technologies such as the supersonic gas jet based beam profile monitor
and the discovery of the Higgs Boson, but for industry the extreme conditions created by this big science infrastructure provide the ultimate test environment for new technologies. The LHC is currently being upgraded to
T
increase its luminosity (rate of collisions) by a factor of ten to increase the number of rare particles it is able to generate. Funding of £26m for the High Luminosity (HL-LHC) upgrade has just been announced for a range of projects aimed at developing the technologies needed to achieve this ambition. This includes super conducting magnets for improved beam control, new types of cavities for beam rotation, and improved diagnostics for monitoring and controlling the beams. Many of these are being delivered by UK universities and will require high-tech components commissioned from industry. Particles such as those created by the LHC
32
he Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may, in the eyes of the public, be associated with increasing understanding of the ‘Big Bang’
are increasingly being used in a range of applications ranging from mass spectroscopy and ion implantation in semiconductor fabrication through to antimatter studies with antiprotons, nuclear physics studies using rare isotope beams, and hadron cancer therapy (a new form of irradiation therapy that uses protons and other ions instead of x-rays). The scarcity of the particles means that all these
areas would profit from beam intensity measurement that can be done in real-time and without destroying or perturbing the beam itself.
SUPerSonIC gaS jet beam ProfILer One of the HL-LHC upgrade projects is led by researchers from the University of Liverpool’s Quantum Systems and Accelerator Research (QUASAR) Group. With increased luminosity the beams become too powerful and beam instrumentation currently used would no longer work. This requires entirely new approaches to
Prof Carsten Welsch. Credit: Cockcroft Institute
fully characterise the beams. The QUASAR group is targeting this challenge with the development of a supersonic gas jet beam profiler. The gas jet profiler creates a thin screen of
electrically neutral particles. This jet then crosses the primary beam in the HL-LHC, resulting in excitation of the particles in the jet and the emission of light. This light can then be detected and used for two-dimensional imaging of the beam. The non-interceptive gas jet beam profiler is
flexible and scalable, enabling its use across a range of accelerators, and is not restricted to high- energy storage rings such as the HL-LHC. It can measure the detailed properties of essentially any beam of charged particles in just a few seconds. The equipment developed in this process will
overcome the limitations of existing technologies. Currently beam-monitoring techniques rely
on sensing the electromagnetic fields induced by the beam. Low-intensity beams present a considerable challenge due to the weak signals available to the diagnostic pickups, while, at the
November 2020 Instrumentation Monthly
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74
