Commissioning and first operational experience of the ATLAS beam conditions and loss monitors based on pCVD diamond sensors

Abstract

Primary goal of ATLAS Beam Condition and Beam Loss Monitors based on polycrystalline chemical vapor deposition (pCVD) diamonds is to protect the ATLAS inner silicon detectors from beam incidents. The sensor material was chosen due to its radiation hardness. The first one, ATLAS Beam Condition Monitor (BCM) utilizes fast front end amplifiers and processing electronics capable of handling events in real time and storing data in circular buffer thousand LHC turns deep for post-mortem analysis. There are eight detectors installed, four on each side of interaction point (IP) of ATLAS spectrometer. Due to fast timing and high efficiency for detecting single particles BCM will also provide valuable information on instantaneous luminosity. The second system, ATLAS Beam Loss Monitor (BLM) is adopted after similar system developed in the LHC beam instrumentation group with detectors replaced with the pCVD diamonds, with six of such detectors on each side of the IP. In this contribution the design and commissioning of the above two systems will be presented and results of the first operational experience will be shown as obtained in combined ATLAS framework both with the first LHC beam and commissioning cosmic ray runs.