Development of a Beam Condition Monitor System for the Experimental Areas of the LHC Using CVD Diamond

The CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will store 2808 bunches per colliding beam, each bunch consisting of 10^11 protons at an energy of 7 TeV. If there is a failure in an element of the accelerator, the resulting beam losses could cause damages not only to the machine but also to the experiments. A Beam Condition Monitor (BCM) is foreseen to monitor fast increments of particle fluxes near the interaction point and, if necessary, to generate an abort signal to the LHC accelerator control to dump the beams. The system is being developed initially for the CMS experiment but is sufficiently general to find potential applications elsewhere. Due to its high radiation hardness, CVD diamond has been studied for use as the BCM sensor. Various samples of CVD diamond have been characterized extensively with a Sr-90 source and high intensity test beams in order to assess the capabilities of such sensors and to study whether this detector technology is suitable for a BCM system. The results from these investigations are presented in this dissertation.