Construction of a Mobile Irradiation Instrument for the Verification of the CERN LHC Beam Loss Monitoring System

The strategy for machine protection and quench prevention of the super-conducting elements of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) is heavily reliant on its beam loss monitoring system. This is one of the most complex and large-scale beam instrumentation systems deployed anywhere in the world. In order to augment the system's dependability and verify the correct connection of each of the approximately 4000 detectors distributed around the 27 km LHC ring to its assigned channel in the electronic system, a mobile irradiation instrument has been designed and built. This instrument can be easily and safely transported along the LHC tunnel and imitate a localised beam loss at each BLM detector. This paper describes the concept of the instrument, its engineering design, the safety measures included and recent upgrades. Possible future improvements of the device are also considered.