Abstract-The decay of the sextupole component in the bending dipoles during injection and the subsequent snapback at the start of beam acceleration are issues of common concern for all superconducting colliders built or in construction. Recent studies performed on LHC and Tevatron dipole magnets revealed many similarities in the snapback characteristics. Some are expected, e.g. the effect of operational history. One particular similarity, however, is striking and is the subject of this paper. It appears that there is a simple linear relation between the amount of sextupole drift during the decay and the magnet current (or field) change during the ramp required to resolve the snapback. It is surprising that the linear correlation between snapback amplitude and snapback field holds very well for all magnets of the same family (e.g. Tevatron or LHC dipoles). In this paper we present the data collected to date and discuss a simple theory that explains the scaling found.Index Terms-Current distribution, decay and snapback, magnetization reversal, superconducting accelerator magnets.

Abstract-The quality of the magnetic field in superconducting accelerator magnets is associated with the properties of the superconducting cable. Current imbalances due to coupling currents AI, as large as 100 A, are induced by spatial variations of the field sweep rate and contact resistances. During injection at a constant field all magnetic field components show a decay behavior. The decay is caused by a diffusion of coupling currents into the whole magnet. This results in a redistribution of the transport current among the strands and causes a demagnetization of the superconducting cable. As soon as the field is ramped up again after the end of injection, the magnetization rapidly recovers from the decay and follows the course of the original hysteresis curve. In order to clarify the interactions between the changes in current and magnetization during injection we performed a number of experiments. A magnetic field with a spatially periodic pattern was applied to a superconducting wire in order to simulate the coupling behavior in a magnet. This model system was placed into a stand for magnetization measurements and the influence of different powering conditions was analyzed.

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