#Industry News
Over 140 Spectrum Instrumentation Digitizers at CERN
Used in machine protection systems of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider
Grosshansdorf, Germany – 19. April 2018. Over 140 digitizer cards from Spectrum Instrumentation are being used in the machine protection systems of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The cards are used to check that the particle beams have been accurately deflected. Incredible precision is required for this as two high-energy particle beams travel at close to the speed of light in opposite directions in the 27 km LHC accelerator ring and collide at four locations around the ring.
The energy stored in the two beams is so high that, in the case of loss of control of the beams, the LHC machine could suffer serious damage. To safely dispose of the beams, the LHC Beam Dumping System (LBDS) must extract the full beams from LHC in one revolution and transport them to an absorber block. After every beam dump, post-operation check systems will make sure that the beams were cleanly extracted.
A key part is checking that the fast-pulsed magnets have accurately deflected the particle beams from the LHC rings to the extraction lines. At LBDS, Digitizer cards used to capture the nearly 500 current pulse waveforms to check for correct shape beam synchronization.
