Beam Parameters

High-intensity proton LHC-like beam pulses are extracted from the SPS towards HiRadMat. Within the SPS up to ~6·1013 protons per pulse are accelerated to a momentum of 440 GeV/c and extracted to focal spots as small as ~0.5 mm2 (smaller beamspots down to ~0.25 mm2 are available upon request). The available beam parameters can be found in the following table. Please note that the table shows the entire parameter space of available beam properties but not limitations of certain parameter combinations. Upon discussion with the SPS operators beam parameters can be tuned to match the needs of each experiment.

  Protons 208Pb Ions
Beam Momentum 440 GeV/c 173.5 GeV/n (36.1 TeV per ion)
Pulse Energy up to 4.3 MJ up to 21 kJ
Minimum Bunch Intensity 5 · 109 protons 3 · 107 ions
Maximum Bunch Intensity 2.1 · 1011 protons 7 · 107 ions
Number of Bunches 1 to 288 52
Maximum Pulse Intensity 6 · 1013 protons 3.64 · 109 ions
Bunch Length 11.24 cm 11.24 cm
Bunch Spacing 25 ns 100 ns
Pulse length 7.95 us 5.2 us
Cycle length 22.9 or 40.8 s 13.2 s
Beam Size at Target variable around 1mm2 variable around 1 mm2

The HiRadMat facility generally uses a 440 GeV proton beam extracted from the SPS with a pulse length of up to 7.95 µs and a maximum pulse energy of up to 4.3 MJ. In addition to protons, 208Pb ion beams with a momentum of 173.5 GeV/nucleon, a pulse length of up to 5.2 µs and a total pulse energy of up to 21 kJ can be used too.