Data-driven modeling of beam loss in the LHC

Abstract

In the Large Hadron Collider, the beam losses are continuously measured for machine protection. By design, most of the particle losses occur in the collimation system, where the particles with high oscilla-tion amplitudes or large momentum error are scraped from the beams. The particle loss level is typically optimized manually by changing control parameters, among which are currents in the focusing and defocusing magnets. It is generally challenging to model and predict losses based only on the control parameters, due to the presence of various (non-linear) effects in the system, such as electron clouds, resonance effects, etc., and multiple sources of uncertainty. At the same time understanding the influence of control parameters on the losses is extremely important in order to improve the operation and performance, and future design of accelerators. Prior work [1] showed that modeling the losses as an instantaneous function of the control parameters does not generalize well to data from a different year, which is an indication that the leveraged statistical associations are not capturing the actual mechanisms which should be invariant from 1 year to the next. Given that this is most likely due to lagged effects, we propose to model the losses as a function of not only instantaneous but also previously observed control parameters as well as previous loss values. Using a standard reparameterization, we reformulate the model as a Kalman Filter (KF) which allows for a flexible and efficient estimation procedure. We consider two main variants: one with a scalar loss output, and a second one with a 4D output with loss, horizontal and vertical emittances, and aggregated heatload as components. The two models once learned can be run for a number of steps in the future, and the second model can forecast the evolution of quantities that are relevant to predicting the loss itself. Our results show that the proposed models trained on the beam loss data from 2017 are able to predict the losses on a time horizon of several minutes for the data of 2018 as well and successfully identify both local and global trends in the losses.