First year of operations in the hiradmat irradiation facility at CERN

The HiRadMat facility [1] is designed to provide a test area where the effect of high-intensity pulsed beams on materials or accelerator component assemblies can be studied. The facility is not designed for long-term irradiation studies but rather for single pulse experiments to study the onset of material damage. The designed target is ten experiments per year, with 1015 protons or about 30 high intensity pulses per experiment, thus a total of 1016 protons per year for the whole facility. It is judged that for the majority of the experiments a small number of high intensity pulses would be sufficient in order to investigate the damage to the test samples whilst keeping the activation levels reasonably low such that post-irradiation tests could be performed after a reasonable cool-down period. The HiRadMat facility is situated in the former West Area Neutrino Facility (WANF) target tunnel and is about 35 m below ground. It takes the fast extracted beam from the long straight section LSS6 of SPS, the same used for the TI2 injection line to LHC. The construction of the facility was completed in 2011. Two commissioning periods, one with low-intensity beams in May 2011 and one with high-intensity beams (with intensities up to the 1013 protons/pulse) in summer 2011 were successfully completed [2]. The online documentation for the facility is available at: http://cern.ch/hiradmat.