Results of an Experiment on Hydrodynamic Tunneling at the SPS HiRadMat High Intensity Proton Facility

To predict the damage for a catastrophic failure of the protections systems for the LHC when operating with beams storing 362 MJ, simulation studies of the impact of an LHC beam on targets were performed. Firstly, the energy deposition of the first bunches in a target with FLUKA is calculated. The effect of the energy deposition on the target is then calculated with a hydrodynamic code, BIG2. The impact of only a few bunches leads to a change of target density. The calculations are done iteratively in several steps and show that such beam can tunnel up to 30-35 m into a target. Validation experiments for these calculations at LHC are not possible, therefore experiments were suggested for the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), since\nsimulation studies with the tools used for the LHC also predict hydrodynamic tunneling for SPS beams. An experiment at the SPS-HiRadMat facility (High-Radiation to Materials) using the 440 GeV beam with 144 bunches was performed in July 2012. In this paper we compare the results of this experiment with our calculations of hydrodynamic tunneling.