Woolley, B., Burt, G., Dexter, A. C., Peacock, R., Millar, W. L., Catalan Lasheras, N., et al. (2020). High-gradient behavior of a dipole-mode rf structure. Phys. Rev. Accel. Beams, 23(12), 122002–11pp.
Abstract: A normal-conducting, X-band traveling wave structure operating in the dipole mode has been systematically high-gradient tested to gain insight into the maximum possible gradients in these types of structure. Measured structure conditioning, breakdown behavior, and achieved surface fields are reported as well as a postmortem analysis of the breakdown position and a scanning electron microscope analysis of the high-field surfaces. The results of these measurements are then compared to high-gradient results from monopole-mode cavities. Scaled to a breakdown rate of 10(-6), the cavities were found to operate at a peak electric field of 154 MV/m and a peak modified Poynting vector S-c of 5.48 MW/mm(2). The study provides important input for the further development of dipole-mode cavities for use in the Compact Linear Collider as a crab cavity and dipole-mode cavities for use in x-ray free-electron lasers as well as for studies of the fundamental processes in vacuum arcs. Of particular relevance are the unique field patterns in dipole cavities compared to monopole cavities, where the electric and magnetic fields peak in orthogonal planes, which allow the separation of the role of electric and magnetic fields in breakdown via postmortem damage observation. The azimuthal variation of breakdown crater density is measured and is fitted to sinusoidal functions. The best fit is a power law fit of exponent 6. This is significant, as it shows how breakdown probability varies over a surface area with a varying electric field after conditioning to a given peak field.
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Esposito, R. et al, & Domingo-Pardo, C. (2021). Design of the third-generation lead-based neutron spallation target for the neutron time-of-flight facility at CERN. Phys. Rev. Accel. Beams, 24(9), 093001–17pp.
Abstract: The neutron time-of-flight (n_TOF) facility at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) is a pulsed white-spectrum neutron spallation source producing neutrons for two experimental areas: the Experimental Area 1 (EAR1), located 185 m horizontally from the target, and the Experimental Area 2 (EAR2), located 20 m above the target. The target, based on pure lead, is impacted by a high-intensity 20-GeV/c pulsed proton beam. The facility was conceived to study neutron-nucleus interactions for neutron kinetic energies between a few meV to several GeV, with applications of interest for nuclear astrophysics, nuclear technology, and medical research. After the second-generation target reached the end of its lifetime, the facility underwent a major upgrade during CERN's Long Shutdown 2 (LS2, 2019-2021), which included the installation of the new third-generation neutron target. The first- and second-generation targets were based on water-cooled massive lead blocks and were designed focusing on EAR1, since EAR2 was built later. The new target is cooled by nitrogen gas to avoid erosion-corrosion and contamination of cooling water with radioactive lead spallation products. Moreover, the new design is optimized also for the vertical flight path and EAR2. This paper presents an overview of the target design focused on both physics and thermomechanical performance, and includes a description of the nitrogen cooling circuit and radiation protection studies.
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Fuster-Martinez, N., Bruce, R., Hofer, M., Persson, T., Redaelli, S., & Tomas, R. (2022). Aperture measurements with ac dipoles and movable collimators in the Large Hadron Collider. Phys. Rev. Accel. Beams, 25(10), 101002–13pp.
Abstract: This paper presents a first experimental demonstration of a new nondestructive method for aperture measurements based on ac dipoles. In high intensity particle colliders, such as the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), aperture measurements are crucial for a safe operation while optimizing the optics in order to reduce the size of the colliding beams and hence increase the luminosity. In the LHC, this type of measurements became mandatory during beam commissioning and the current method used is based on the destructive blowup of bunches using a transverse damper. The new method presented in this paper uses the ac-dipole excitation to generate adiabatic forced oscillations of the beam in order to create losses to identify the smallest aperture in the machine without blowing up the beam emittance. A precise and tuneable control of the oscillation amplitude enables the beams to be reused for several aperture measurements, as well as for other subsequent commissioning activities. Measurements performed with the new method are presented and compared with the current LHC transverse damper method for two different beam energies and two different operational optics.
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Perez, A. (2010). Information encoding of a qubit into a multilevel environment. Phys. Rev. A, 81(5), 052326–6pp.
Abstract: I consider the interaction of a small quantum system (a qubit) with a structured environment consisting of many levels. The qubit will experience a decoherence process, which implies that part of its initial information will be encoded into correlations between system and environment. I investigate how this information is distributed on a given subset of levels as a function of its size, using the mutual information between both entities, in the spirit of the partial-information plots studied by Zurek and co-workers. In this case we can observe some differences, which arise from the fact that I am partitioning just one quantum system and not a collection of them. However, some similar features, like redundancy (in the sense that a given amount of information is shared by many subsets), which increases with the size of the environment, are also found here.
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Hinarejos, M., Di Franco, C., Romanelli, A., & Perez, A. (2014). Chirality asymptotic behavior and non-Markovianity in quantum walks on a line. Phys. Rev. A, 89(5), 052330–7pp.
Abstract: We investigate the time evolution of the chirality reduced density matrix for a discrete-time quantum walk on a one-dimensional lattice. The matrix is obtained by tracing out the spatial degree of freedom. We analyze the standard case, without decoherence, and the situation in which decoherence appears in the form of broken links in the lattice. By examining the trace distance for possible pairs of initial states as a function of time, we conclude that the evolution of the reduced density matrix is non-Markovian, in the sense defined by Breuer, Laine, and Piilo [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 210401 (2009)]. As the level of noise increases, the dynamics approaches a Markovian process. The highest non-Markovianity corresponds to the case without decoherence. The reduced density matrix tends always to a well-defined limit that we calculate, but only in the decoherence-free case is this limit nontrivial.
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