A New Fast Acquisition Profile for the LHC and the SPS

The beam profile is an important parameter for the tuning of particle accelerators. These profiles are often obtained by imaging optical transition radiation from a radiator to a CCD camera. This technique works well for slow acquisitions, but in some cases it is necessary to acquire profiles with higher rates where such standard cameras are no longer suitable. In our case the aim is to sample the profiles on a turn-by-turn basis which, for the CERN-SPS, corresponds to ~44 kHz. For this reason we have developed a fast detector based on a recent Hamamatsu linear CCD and an optical system using cylindrical lenses. The readout electronics is based on CERN developed, radiation tolerant components and the digital data is transmitted to an acquisition board outside of the tunnel by mean of optical fibres. This contribution describes the system and shows the performance obtained on a test bench.