Speaker
Description
Intense and high-energy proton beams are impacted onto fixed targets within the CERN’s accelerator complex to produce secondary particles (such as neutrons, antiprotons, kaons, pions, etc.) for physics experiments. A consolidation program of some of these particle-producing targets is currently ongoing at CERN. This includes the antiproton and neutron production targets (AD-Target and n_TOF Target respectively). At the same time, the Beam Dump Facility (BDF) Project study, aiming at exploring feebly interacting particles and employing a high power production target, has been launched. These different projects involve extensive R&D activities to assess the specific challenges related to the thermomechanical response of these high power targets: (i) For the AD-Target the main challenge lies in the extreme dynamic loading of its high-density core, constituted by a high-density refractory metal. (ii) For the n_TOF target lays in the behavior of a soft material such as Pb under the highly dynamics thermal loads induced by the primary beam impacts and the delicate balance between the physics reach and the required reliability. (iii) For BDF the challenge lies in the high power density and respective cooling as well as in the implementation of manufacturing techniques capable of guaranteeing an effective target cooling and high reliability.
Some of these R&D activities have profited from the execution of proton-beam experiments using the CERN’s HiRadMat facility, which provide intense and fast extracted 440 GeV/c proton beams for testing targets and accelerator components while monitoring their response by means of online instrumentation. This contribution will provide a summary of these activities, which could also be transversally applied to the design of future high power neutrino targets.
| Working Group | WG3 : Accelerator Physics |
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