A beam-synchronous gated peak-detector for the LHC beam observation system

Measurements of the bunch peak amplitude using the longitudinal wideband wall-current monitor are a vital tool used in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) beam observation system. These peak-detected measurements can be used to diagnose bunch shape oscillations, for example coherent quadrupole oscillations, that occur at injection and during beam manipulations. Peak-detected Schottky diagnostics can also be used to obtain the synchrotron frequency distribution and other parameters from a bunched beam under stable conditions. For the LHC a beam-synchronous gated peak detector has been developed to allow individual bunches to be monitored without the influence of other bunches circulating in the machine. The requirement for the observation of both low intensity pilot bunches and high intensity bunches for physics requires a detector front-end with a high bandwidth and a large dynamic range while the usage for Schottky measurements requires low noise electronics. This paper will present the design of this detector system as well as initial results obtained during the 2012- 2013 LHC run.