31 August 2010
CERN gives support to crab cavities for the LHC
CERN has unambiguously supported the use of crab cavities for the phase II LHC luminosity upgrade. An official CERN statement from Steve Myers, CERN Director of Accelerators and Technology was released shortly after the 3rd LHC Crab Cavity Workshop at CERN in September.
Statements on Crab Cavities from CERN.pdf
The statements affirm that
“Following the success of KEKB, CERN must pursue the use of crab cavities for the LHC, since the potential luminosity increase is significant.”
and that the crab cavity infrastructure should be included in all other LHC upgrade scenarios. The document then goes on to state
“Crab Cavities can increase the LHC luminosity without an accompanying increase in beam intensity, thereby avoiding negative side effects associated with high intensity and high stored beam energy. This opinion has been endorsed by the general-purpose high-luminosity experiments.”
The document however does highlight machine protection issues that must be resolved before a crab cavity can be installed in the LHC.
The Cockcroft Institute is an internationally renowned centre of excellence for crab cavity research. The CI have previously lead the designed of the crab cavity system for the ILC and are also currently in the process of designing the system for CLIC. The CI involvement in the LHC crab cavity has been focused on the design of the SRF cavity, its couplers and the LLRF system. At present the team has designed a 2-cell 800 MHz elliptical cavity with on-cell waveguide damping for the ‘global’ crab cavity scheme and a 400 MHz 4-rod parallel bar compact crab cavity for the ‘local’ scheme.
The crab cavity workshop jointly organised by CERN, CockcroftUS-LARP, EUCARD-ACCNET, Cockcroft Institute and KEK, made the recommendation that the international R&D should focus on the compact crab cavity designs as these are compatible with both ‘global’ and ‘local’ crab cavity schemes.
