Development of the System Test for the LHC Tune Measurement and Abort Gap Monitoring

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest accelerator in the world and it will collide opposing beams of 7 TV protons together. It is built inside a 27km tunnel on the border between France and Switzerland. Within the framework of the project IUSS- Ferrara, I collaborated with the members of the AB-BI section at CERN: Accelerator Beam - Beam Instrumentation. My degree thesis is the result of this cooperation. My project is made of two sections, one for each themes analyzed during this year at CERN: the first one concerns the Tune, the second one is about the Abort gap. LHC is a synchrotron, an accelerator using dipole magnets to bending and quadrupole magnets to transverse focusing. Passing through this pattern of magnets, particles make oscillations. We refer to these ones as Betatron oscillations. The number of such oscillations/turn is called Tune. The ability tomeasure the tune is important for many kinds of diagnostic. In the base band tune (BBQ) measurement system developed at CERN the signal is digitized with a 24 bit audio codec and is processed in the FPGA of a VME board (DAB, Digital Acquisition Board). The DAB is equipped with a post mortem memory: its function is to save the last received data before a beam loss. My goal in this subject was to verify the correct working of the post mortem memory. In order to do it, I developed a LabVIEW software to interface with this memory and I performed some tests properly simulating events of beam loss.