Signal Conditioning of Beam Loss Monitor Systems

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the European Laboratory for Particle Physics constitutes today's largest particle accelerator. It requires several installations for its safe operation, such as the beam loss system that protects the superconducting magnets from being destroyed due to excessive losses. The system is based on ionization chambers that transform the particle loss into an electric current. This current is processed by an analog front end, converted into a digital number and transmitted from the accelerator tunnel to the surface, where the final evaluation takes place. This work starts with a description of the beam loss system. A current-to-frequency converter is developed that produces a loss equivalent digital number. This number is transmitted over a distance of 2 km to the surface. The transmission suffers from high attenuation and distortion. A transfer function model was developed to model lossy transmission lines under practical conditions.§This book is intended for students and engineers that are concerned with the development of analog front end electronics as well as with the analysis of data transmission over lossy transmission lines.