A Diagnostic Test Bench for the LIGHT Accelerator

The LIGHT accelerator is the first compact Linac that will deliver proton beams up to 230 MeV for cancer treatment. The accelerator is only 24m long and is being built to be modular and capable of changing proton beam energy and intensity pulse-to-pulse at up to 200Hz. The LIGHT prototype is currently being commissioned by AVO / ADAM at CERN, while the first full installation is foreseen in 2019. Here we present the design and implementation of a moveable diagnostic test bench which is used to measure a full set of beam properties at each commissioning step. Parameters measured include beam current, pulse length, energy, position, transverse profile and emittance. The compact instruments, the electronics and the controls that equip the test bench are the same as those who will be permanently installed along the accelerator after the commissioning. The first results obtained with the test bench for beams up to 16 MeV are shown here. We demonstrate that the chosen instrumentation achieves a very high sensitivity, dynamic range, reliability and immunity to EM noise. Procedures for on-line calibration of the instruments are also discussed.
Proceedings of the 9th Int. Particle Accelerator Conf., IPAC2018, Vancouver, BC, Canada