HiRadMat: A Facility Beyond the Realms of Materials Testing

Abstract

The ever-expanding requirements of high-power targets and accelerator equipment has highlighted the need for facilities capable of accommodating experiments with a diverse range of objectives. HiRadMat, a High Radiation to Materials testing facility at CERN has, throughout operation, established itself as a global user facility capable of going beyond its initial design goals. Pulsed high energy, high intensity, proton beams have been delivered to experiments ranging from materials testing, detector's prototype validation, radiation to electronics assessment and beam instrumentation. A 440 GeV/c proton beam is provided directly from the CERN SPS. Up to 288 bunches/pulse at a maximum pulse intensity of 3.5 × 1013 protons/pulse can be delivered. Through collaborative efforts, HiRadMat has developed into a state-of-the-art facility with improved in situ measurement routines, beam diagnostic systems and data acquisition techniques, offered to all users. This contribution summarises the recent experimental achievements, highlights previous facility enhancements and discusses potential future upgrades with particular focus on HiRadMat as a facility open to novel experiments.

Channeling efficiency reduction in high dose neutron irradiated silicon crystals for high energy and high intensity beam collimation and extraction

“…Recently, further tests to evaluate the robustness of silicon crystals in case of accidental fast irradiation during machine operations have been performed by UA9 at the CERN HiRadMat facility [25][26][27]. These crystals are of the same type used for LHC collimation and SPS extraction and they have been irradiated, bent by the same holder used for accelerator operations, with the same proton beam extracted from the SPS or used to fill the LHC (2.5 × 10 13 440 GeV/c protons, with a pulse length of 7.2 μs.).…”

Dynamic Response of Graphitic Targets with Tantalum Cores Impacted by Pulsed 440‐GeV Proton Beams

“…Online monitoring equipment included multiple PT100 thermocouples per target station and HBM XY9 bi-directional strain gauges on each sample (48 in total) [17] in order to record the beam-induced axial and tangential strain. A socalled beam television system (BTV) consisting of a glassy carbon optical transition radiation (OTR) screen was used to record the transversal profile and displacement of the beam [14]. Two Polytec RSV-150 Laser Doppler Vibrometers (LDVs) [18] were used to record the surface velocity of two samples per beam impact through a radiation-hard optical viewport (SCHOTT RS323G19 [19]).…”

“…e experiment was conducted at the High-Radiation to Materials (HiRadMat) facility at the Super Proton Synchroton (SPS) of CERN [13,14]. All samples of target station 6 were impacted by 440 GeV proton beam pulses with intensities between 5 × 10 10 and 1.7 × 10 12 protons per pulse (ppp).…”

“…is article reports first results of the HRMT-38 "FlexMat" experiment in which various graphite materials of cylindrical geometry (typically 10 mm in length and in diameter) were impacted by a focussed high-intensity and short-pulse proton beam of 440 GeV/c momentum at the High-Radiation to Materials (HiRadMat) facility at the Super Proton Synchrotron of CERN [13,14]. Ten targets contained a press-fit tantalum "core" of 3 mm diameter.…”

Beam steering performance of bent silicon crystals irradiated with high-intensity and high-energy protons

“…No visual damage was observed on the crystal after the irradiation with several 7.8 µs pulses of 3.2 × 10 13 protons in the extracted 440 GeV beam. The High-Radiation to Materials (HiRadMat) facility was used for the test [8]. The channeling efficiency was not measured after the irradiation [9].…”