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Abstract: The outgassing rate of the collimators in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has an important role for the life-time of the Non-Evaporable Getter (NEG), and an accurate analysis allows the definition of future activities, like NEG vacuum activation. For these reasons, both, total outgassing rate and gas composition of a secondary collimator have been measured in the laboratory. The outgassing rate decreases by about two orders of magnitude by after bake-out and moreover, repeated bake-out further reduced the outgassing rate. The gas transmission through the NEG coated beam pipes and the resulting pressure distributions near the collimator were also measured in a dedicated setup. It is found that the main gas component after just 2 m of NEG coated beam pipe is CH4 due to the extreme pumping speed of NEG for the other gases. Large amount of outgassing for H2 and carbon related molecules are released when moving the collimator jaws. It is found that the NEG is very effective even in such case with large gas load. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has 54 km of ultra-high vacuum (UHV) beam chambers out of which about 90% are at cryogenic temperature (1.9 K) and the rest at room temperature. During operation, the residual gas density in the beam pipes is dominated by beam induced effect such ion, electron and photon-stimulated gas desorption. Therefore, the computation of gas density profile is of great importance to confirm the vacuum stability, and to estimate the beam lifetime. Moreover, the gas density profiles are essential to determine the machine induced background in the experimental areas, and to define the pressure profile in the cryogenic sectors where there is no vacuum instrumentation available. In this paper, the vacuum stability is studied for a newly proposed upgrade of the vacuum chamber at the ATLAS interaction point, using the vacuum stability code called VASCO. The residual gas density profile along the ATLAS vacuum chambers and the effects of photon and electron flux hitting the vacuum chamber walls are presented and analysed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We performed a combined secondary electron yield (SEY) and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy study as a function of the electron dose and energy on a Cu technical surface representative of the LHC accelerator walls. The electron bombardment is accompanied by a clear chemical modification, indicating an increased graphitization as the SEY decreases. The decrease in the SEY is also found to depend significantly on the kinetic energy of the primary electrons. When low-energy primary electrons are employed (E ≤ 20 eV), the reduction of the SEY is slower and smaller in magnitude than when higher-energy electrons are used. Consequences of this observation are discussed mainly for their relevance on the commissioning scenario for the LHC in operation at CERN (Geneva), but are expected to be of interest for other research fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]