Application of Diamond Based Beam Loss Monitors at LHC

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was conceived in the 1980s and started the operation in 2008. It needed more than 20 years to plan and construct this accelerator and its experiments. Four main experiments are located around the ring, Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS), A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) and LHC beauty (LHCb). Two beams that traveling in opposite direction in the LHC tunnel, collide in each of the experiments. The navigation of the beams is done by over 10000 magnets and each beam has a stored energy of 362MJ which correspond to the kinetic energy of a train like the TGV travelling of 150km/h. Only a small percentage of that energy can damage the material in the LHC ring or the magnets. This would mean a repair time of months or years, without taking any data. To avoid such a scenario, it is important to monitor the beam condition and measure the amount of losses of the beam. Such losses can for example happen due to dust particles in the vacuum chambers or due to deviations of the beam parameters. Several systems called beam loss monitors (BLMs) can measure beam losses. This thesis concentrates on two of them, ionization chambers and diamond detectors. Both types of beam loss monitors. Over 3600 ionization chambers are installed in the LHC, especially near each quadrupol and next to collimators. Ionization chambers have a time resolution of 40us that is a half LHC turn and in case of a large beam loss, they request a beam dump. Another type of beam loss monitors are diamond sensors because of a time resolution of about one nanosecond and high radiation hardness. One diamond detector system is located in the cleaning region of the LHC and is able to detect various types of beam losses. Another diamond detector system (BCM1F) is installed inside the CMS detector to protect the CMS from adverse beam conditions. BCM1F monitors also the luminosity during collisions and delivers important beam parameters. Additional condition monitors, based on the BCM1F system, are located next to CMS, near to LHCb and ALICE to measure large beam losses in the LHC ring. One section explains the process of a beam loss due to dust particles and additional simulations were done to understand these process in more detail. The result of the simulation are also given in the same section. Beam loss data recorded by the diamond sensors in the cleaning region and the BCM1F diamonds are presented.