Beam Commissioning and Performance Characterisation of the LHC Beam Dump Kicker Systems

The LHC beam dump system was commissioned with beam in 2009. This paper describes the operational experience with the kicker systems and the tests and measurements to qualify them for operation. The kicker performance was characterized with beam by measurements of the deflection angles, using bunches extracted at different times along the kicker sweep. The kicker performance was also continuously monitored for each dump with measurement and analysis of all kick pulses, allowing diagnostic of errors and of long-term drifts. The results are described and compared to the expectations.