Changes to the Transfer Line Collimation System for the High-Luminosity LHC Beams

The current LHC transfer line collimation system will not be able to provide enough protection for the high brightness beams in the high-luminosity LHC era. The new collimation system will have to attenuate more and be more robust than its predecessor. The active jaw length of the new transfer line collimators will therefore be 2.1 m instead of currently 1.2 m. The transfer line optics will have to be adjusted for the new collimator locations and larger beta functions at the collimators for absorber robustness reasons. In this paper the new design of the transfer line collimation system will be presented with its implications on transfer line optics and powering, maintainability, protection of transfer line magnets in case of beam loss on a collimator and protection of the LHC aperture.The current LHC transfer line collimation system will not be able to provide enough protection for the high brightness beams in the high-luminosity LHC era. The new collimation system will have to attenuate more and be more robust than its predecessor. The active jaw length of the new transfer line collimators will therefore be 2.1 m instead of currently 1.2 m. The transfer line optics will have to be adjusted for the new collimator locations and larger beta functions at the collimators for absorber robustness reasons. In this paper the new design of the transfer line collimation system will be presented with its implications on transfer line optics and powering, maintainability, protection of transfer line magnets in case of beam loss on a collimator and protection of the LHC apertur

The electron accelerators for the AWAKE experiment at CERN—Baseline and Future Developments

The AWAKE collaboration prepares a proton driven plasma wakefield acceleration experiment using the SPS beam at CERN. A long proton bunch extracted from the SPS interacts with a high power laser and a 10 m long rubidium vapor plasma cell to create strong wakefields allowing sustained electron acceleration. The electron beam to probe these wakefields is created by an electron accelerator consisting of an rf-gun and a booster structure. This electron source should provide beams with intensities between 0.1 and 1 nC, bunch lengths between 0.3 and 3 ps and an emittance of the order of 2 mm mrad. The booster structure should accelerate the electrons to 16 MeV. The electron line includes a series of diagnostics (pepper-pot, BPMs, spectrometer, Faraday cup and screens) and an optical transfer line merges the electron beam with the proton beam on the same axis. The installation of the electron line started in early 2017 and the commissioning will take place at the end of 2017. The first phase of operation is called RUN1. After the long shutdown of LHC a second phase for AWAKE is planned starting 2021 called RUN2. In this phase the aim is to demonstrate the acceleration of high quality electron beams therefore a bunch length of the order of 100 fs rms is required corresponding to a fraction of the plasma wavelength. The AWAKE collaboration is studying the design of such an injector either based on classical rf-gun injectors or on laser wake-field acceleration. The focus for the RF accelerator is on a hybrid design using an S-band rf-gun and x-band bunching and acceleration cavities. The layout of the current and the future electron accelerator and transfer line, including the diagnostics will be presented

BDF/SHiP at the ECN3 high-intensity beam facility

The BDF/SHiP collaboration has proposed a general-purpose intensity-frontier experimental facility operating in beam-dump mode at the CERN SPS accelerator to search for feebly interacting GeV-scale particles and to perform measurements in neutrino physics. BDF/SHiP complements the world-wide program of New Physics searches by exploring a large region of parameter space which cannot be addressed by other experiments, and which reaches several orders of magnitude below existing bounds. The SHiP detector is sensitive both to decay and scattering signatures of models with heavy neutral leptons, dark photons, dark scalars, axion-like particles, light dark matter and other feebly interacting particles. In neutrino physics, BDF/SHiP can perform unprecedented measurements with tau neutrinos and neutrino-induced charm production. Following the Technical Proposal submitted in 2015, the subsequent three-year Comprehensive Design Study (CDS), and the recent study of BDF/SHiP in existing beam facilities around the SPS, this paper restates the motivation and reports on the implementation and physics performance of BDF/SHiP in the SPS ECN3 high-intensity beam facility

Evaluation of TRAF6 in a large multiancestral lupus cohort

OBJECTIVE: Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a heterogeneous autoimmune disease with significant immune system aberrations resulting from complex heritable genetics as well as environmental factors. We undertook to study the role of TRAF6 as a candidate gene for SLE, since it plays a major role in several signaling pathways that are important for immunity and organ development. METHODS: Fifteen single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) across TRAF6 were evaluated in 7,490 SLE patients and 6,780 control subjects from different ancestries. Population-based case-control association analyses and meta-analyses were performed. P values, false discovery rate q values, and odds ratios (ORs) with 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) were calculated. RESULTS: Evidence of associations was detected in multiple SNPs. The best overall P values were obtained for SNPs rs5030437 and rs4755453 (P = 7.85 × 10(-5) and P = 4.73 × 10(-5) , respectively) without significant heterogeneity among populations (P = 0.67 and P = 0.50, respectively, in Q statistic). In addition, SNP rs540386, which was previously reported to be associated with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), was found to be in linkage disequilibrium with these 2 SNPs (r(2) = 0.95) and demonstrated evidence of association with SLE in the same direction (meta-analysis P = 9.15 × 10(-4) , OR 0.89 [95% CI 0.83-0.95]). The presence of thrombocytopenia improved the overall results in different populations (meta-analysis P = 1.99 × 10(-6) , OR 0.57 [95% CI 0.45-0.72], for rs5030470). Finally, evidence of family-based association in 34 African American pedigrees with the presence of thrombocytopenia was detected in 1 available SNP (rs5030437) with a Z score magnitude of 2.28 (P = 0.02) under a dominant model. CONCLUSION: Our data indicate the presence of association of TRAF6 with SLE, consistent with the previous report of association with RA. These data provide further support for the involvement of TRAF6 in the pathogenesis of autoimmunity