Speaker
Arjan Verweij
(CERN)
Description
Quenches in superconducting circuits are part of the normal operation of the LHC, and can never be excluded. Operation at 3.5 TeV resulted in only a small amount of quenches in 2011, especially because most magnets were operated below 20% of the critical current, resulting in a temperature margin of about 5 K. When operating at about 6.5-7 TeV beam energy, the temperature margin will only be about 1.5 K and the magnets will be much more sensitive to beam losses, while at the same time the beam intensity will be higher. In this talk I will discuss the quench sensitivity of the magnets due to beam losses. I will also present the probability of increased quenching of the superconducting circuits due to other effects such as higher currents and ramp rates, increased EM coupling, and in some cases reduced QPS thresholds.
