Design and implementation of a Client-Server System for Acquiring Beam Intensity Data from High Energy Accelerators at CERN

Abstract

The world’s largest research center in the domain of High Energy Physics (HEP) is the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) whose main goal is to accelerate particles through a sequence of accelerators – accelerator complex – and bring them into collision in order to study the fundamental elements of matter and the forces acting between them. For controlling the accelerator complex, CERN needs several diagnostic tools to provide information about the beam’s attributes and one such system is the Fast Beam Current Transformer (FBCT) measuring system that provides bunch-by-bunch and total beam intensity information. The current hardware and firmware of the FBCT system has certain issues and lacks diagnostics as a lot of the calculations are done in an FPGA. In order to improve on this, the firmware was redesigned and simplified in order to increase its capabilities and provide the base of a unified FBCT measuring system that could be installed in several of CERN’s accelerator complex’s parts. Following the above changes, this Thesis proposes the implementation of an operational client-server software solution to control the FBCT installation in the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerator, as well as studying the design and implementation of a unified client-server software scheme that can replace the operational ones in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and can eventually allow further installations of the FBCT measuring system, elsewhere in the CERN accelerator complex