Probing the losses for a high power beam

Abstract

The High Intensity Proton Accelerator (HIPA) cyclotron at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) delivers 590 MeV CW proton beam with a maximum power of 1.42 MW. After extraction, the beam is transferred in a 120 m long channel towards two target stations (TgM and TgE) for surface muon production before depositing its remaining power at the spallation target SINQ for neutron production. As part of the High Intensity Muon Beamline (HIMB) feasibility study, the first of these targets will be replaced with a thicker one thereby increasing the rate of surface muon production. However, a key challenge for HIMB is to maintain the proton beam losses to the lowest possible levels which requires improving our understanding of the distributed losses along the MW-class beamline. To this end, a new approach was developed where the aim is to relate the experimental values of the temperature, beam profile measurements as well as beam current measurements to the combined power deposition calculations and primary beam losses using Monte Carlo simulation tools.