Experimental Setup to Measure the Damage Limits of Superconducting Magnets due to Beam Impact at CERN's HiRadMat Facility

Abstract

The future upgrade of CERN’s injector chain for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will lead to an increase of the beam brightness in the LHC. Beam absorbers are capturing missteered beams, but some limited beam impact on superconducting magnets can hardly be avoided. Therefore, it is planned to measure the damage limits of superconducting magnet components due to beam impact at CERN’s HiRadMat facility using the 440 GeV proton beam from the Super Proton Synchrotron. Two experiments are proposed. One at ambient and one at cryogenic temperatures, where several pre-stressed stacks of LHC main dipole Nb-Ti cables and some single strands will be irradiated with varying beam intensities. The electrical integrity and the degradation of critical current will be measured after the removal from the HiRadMat facility. In the cold experiment some sample magnets will be added and the degradation of performance will be monitored online. In this contribution the experimental setup of the first experiment, including the sample container and cable stacks, is presented.