Bent crystal channeling has promising advantages for accelerator beam collimation at high energy hadron facilities such as the LHC. This significance has been amplified by several surprising developments including multi-pass channeling and the observation of enhanced deflections over the entire arc of a bent crystal. The second effect has been observed both at RHIC and recently at the Tevatron. Results are reported showing channeling collimation of the circulating proton beam halo at the Tevatron. Parenthetically, this study is the highest energy proton channeling experiment ever carried out. The study is continuing.Keywords: Channeling, collimation, accelerator, Tevatron
THE CHALLENGE OF COLLIDER COLLIMATIONDuring the design of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) it was recognized that collimating the intense proton beams required for high luminosity posed daunting challenges. A halo develops around any circulating beam due to many effects such as beam-gas and beam-beam interactions. Superconducting magnets can be quenched or destroyed if they scrape even a tiny portion of the beam. Collider detector devices such as silicon strip detectors are even more sensitive.In so-called single stage conventional collimation the beam halo is scraped by a collimator moved into the halo. Typically the collimator is a 1.5 m long block of steel or other medium or high-Z material. A certain fraction of the halo will survive, either by traversing the length of the collimator or by scattering out of the collimator block. Suppressing the out-scattered particles can be quite difficult. A more sophisticated way to handle the out-scattered particles is to go to a two-stage collimation system 1 . A thin primary target is used to scatter the beam out by increasing the amplitude of the betatron oscillations of the halo particles and thereby increasing the impact parameters on to secondary collimators during the next turns without influencing the unscattered beam.At the SSC, Mokhov and his colleagues 2 proposed an innovative solution to the collimation problem. In their arrangement an aligned, bent single crystal is used to deflect the beam out into a collimator much as a magnetic septum would. However, using the crystal results in a much higher deflection per unit length with little effective septum width. Since the SSC design there have been several developments that have made crystal collimation even more promising. One was a fuller understanding of so-called crystal multi-pass extraction first observed at CERN 3 . The other was the development of several approaches at the Institute for High Energy Physics (IHEP) and the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute (PNPI) for producing very short crystal bending lengths characteristically using anticlastic crystal deformations 4 . In view of the promise for both extraction and collimation the SSC sponsored a research program on crystal extraction at the Tevatron. That experiment, E853 5 , showed that extraction was possible in the context of a superconducting accelerator. FERMILA...