Upgrade of the CERN SPS Beam Position Measurement System

The CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) is a fast cycling hadron accelerator delivering protons with momenta of up to 450 GeV/c for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), fixed target experiments and other users such as the AWAKE plasma acceleration experiment, and also used to accelerate heavy ions. This paper presents the upgrade initiative for the SPS beam position measurement system in the frame of the CERN LHC Injector Upgrade (LIU) project. The new SPS beam position read-out electronics will be based on logarithmic amplifiers, using signals provided by the 216 existing beam position monitors, the majority of which are based on split-plane 'shoebox' technology. It will need to cover a dynamic range sufficient to manage the wide range of SPS beam intensities and bunch formatting schemes to provide turn-by-turn and averaged beam orbits along the SPS acceleration cycles. In order to avoid long coaxial cables, the front-end electronics including the digitisation, will be located inside the accelerator tunnel, with optical transmission to surface processing electronics. This represents an additional challenge in terms of radiation tolerance of electronics components and materials.