The LEP RF Trip and Beam Loss Diagnostics System

During the last years of operation the number of operationally independent RF stations distributed around LEP reached a total of 40. A serious difficulty when running at high energy and high beam intensities was to establish cause and effect in beam loss situations, where the trip of any single RF station would result in beam loss, rapidly producing further multiple RF station trips. For the last year of operation a fast post-mortem diagnostics system was developed to allow precise time-stamping of RF unit trips and beam intensity changes. The system was based on eight local DSP controlled fast acquisition and event recording units, one in each RF sector, connected to critical RF control signals and fast beam intensity monitors and synchronised by GPS. The acquisition units were armed and synchronised at the start of each fill. At the end of the fill the local time-stamped RF trip and beam intensity change history tables were recovered, events ordered and the results stored in a database for subsequent analysis and display. The system was made operational quickly and it proved invaluable for high energy running.