LHC Collimation Project

Home of the Project for the LHC Collimation System

 
Top Project Team Notes Collimator List Sounds/Movies Meetings
Links Papers Talks (WG) Layout IR3/7 Collimator DB Pictures
MP Tests Sounds 2011        
 

BeamLossPattern program for LHC collimation studies


Contents

1. Why studying beam losses?

2. What is BeamLossPattern?

3. The LHC aperture model

4. Features of BeamLossPattern

5. User's manual

6. Source files and executables

7. Auxiliary programs (CountAbs, CleanInelastic, GetAperture)

8. Examples of simulation results

9. References/talks

10. Updated aperture model for optics version V6.500 [May 2006]


Why is it important to study beam losses?

So far, the performance of the LHC collimation system has been studied by using approximate estimates of the transverse population of beam halo. The so-called cleaning inefficiency [1] (Ex.), calculated as the leackage rate of particles that escape from the cleaning insertions, is simulated by taking into account particle tracking throught the magnetic elements and scattering processing in the collimator jaws. The local cleaning inefficiency allows studying the performance of the collimation system, e.g. tolerances on various parameter of the LHC optics and of the collimator mechanics [ref. to RA, chamonix 2003]. Nevertheless, this approximated treatment does not allow one to predict the exact locations of losses around the ring, which is crucial, for example, to estimate the deposited energy on the superconducting magnets.

In order to find out the precise locations of losses, one must check the trajectories of each halo particle and check if they hit the aperture walls somewhere in the machine. This requires (1) an accurate tracking of the particle trajectory and (2) a detailed aperture model of the full ring.

The program BeamLossPattern has been developed to perform detailed beam loss studies for machines like the LHC.


What is BeamLossPattern?

BeamLossPattern is a program that calculates the location of particle losses along an accelerator. It relies on an aperture model of the full machine and takes as an input the particle coordinate as a function of the longitudinal coordinate (referred to as particle trajectories). The figure below illustrates an example of trajectory of a lost particle.

Locations of beam losses are identified with a spatial resolution of 10 centimetres. For the 27 km long LHC ring, this is equivalent to checking 270000 loss locations! This is achieved by interpolating trajectories between to consecutive lattice elements (typical distance up to > 100 m).

The BeamLossPattern program has been optimized for the usage with the tracking tools developed for the LHC collimation studies (a new SixTrack version is used  for collimation studies). For example, it can handle large input files (trajectory files of sizes up to 30GB are processed as a standard simulation campaign). However, the extension to other machines is trivial: one only needs to prodecu trajectories of halo particle with the correct input files format for BeamLossPattern (see below).

It was decided to setup up a simulation tool for beam loss pattern studies independent on the tracking tool. The motivation for this choice is that checking the aperture within the tracking program with the required precision of <10 cm would slow down too much the simulation time. It is noted that the LHC collimation system is designed to provide cleaning inefficiency of the order of 1e-3 to 1e-4. Therefore, in order to accumulate decent statistics on the "few" lost particles, several million of input halo particles must be tracked.

In addition, the fact of having an independent program for beam loss studies has another advantage. For a give set of tracked trajectories, studies for aperture misalignment, closed orbit, etc. may be performed with many statistical seed without requiring tracking simulations for every seed. This further optimizes the time required for simulations.

Example of BeamLossPattern: Trajectory of a particle lost in an LHC interaction region (get PDF file).


The LHC aperture model

The aperture model is a crucial ingredient for producing reliable beam loss maps! Wrong aperture definition of some elements, empty spaces with no aperture defined or wrong locations of aperture bottlenecks can change completely the predictions of loss locations.

The LHC aperture model has mostly been set by using that MADX interfaces with the LHC layout database. However, several aperture definitions required the preparation of dedicated MADX scripts in order to complement missing information on the database (see below).

It is noted that the program BeamLossPattern is completely independent on MADX. MADX is only used to generate input files for the aperture program (aperture definitions versus longitudinal coordinate, survey files with the position of the design orbit, closed-orbit distortions, etc...). In particular, this means that the generated MADX scripts have not been conceived for MADX users: detailed MADX studies (e.g., particle tracking, APL aperture studies) might require different optimization such as positioning of aperture definition markers, definitions of aperture for specific elements, etc.

Aperture files

For the moment, the aperture model for the LHC optics version V6.5 (sequence) contains:

  1. Beam screen location for all cold elements (form database)
  2. Aperture definition for the cold elements within beam screen markers (MADX script)
  3. Aperture definitions for warm elements (warm)
  4. Aperture of the various BPM types (BPM)
  5. Experimental regions (IR1, IR2, IR5, IR8)
  6. Standard aperture definition of the vacuum chambers - no flange position (drifts)
  7. Fixing by hand some special elements (fix holes)

Known missing elements: Recombination chambers, position of vacuum chamber flanges of IR6 kickers.

MADX sample job: sequence, injection strength file, lowb strength file
(Note that a special sequence without DFB's is used to avoid superimpositions with the beam screen markers).

The input files for BeamLossPattern: (inj, lowb)

Zipped file with all required input (uncompress with 'gtar -xvjf GenerateAperture.tgj')

Remark: It is noted that the aperture of collimators and protection devices are not included in the aperture model of the ring. The reason for this choice is that the treatment of these elements is carried out within the tracking code, which provides directly the number of impacting particles on the collimators and the locations of inelastic impacts within the volume of the collimator jaws.
Therefore, the aperture of the above 'injection' and 'lowb' lattices are identical (movable elements with different settings at injection or top energy are the only aperture differences that can arise). Different names for the two cases are kept for compatibility with the BeamLossPattern input.

The BeamLossPattern program does recognize square apertures and hence collimators can easily be modelled if needed. Collimator gap values can he found here.

Aperture types accepted by the program (RECTELLIPSE notation, see MADX manual): Circle, square, ellipse, LHC beam screen, RaceTrack.


BeamLossPattern - some features

Treatment of the design orbit position within the separation dipoles

The LHC design orbit normaly passes throught the aperture centre of all elements. Some exceptions are represented by the separation dipoles, conventionally referred to and D1, D2, D3 and D4. These dipoles are installed at either side of the straight sections around the interaction points and are used to kick the beam in the same vacuum pipe (D1 and D2 magnets, experiment regions) and to increase the beam-beam separation (D3 and D4 magnets, RF, dump and cleaning regions).

BeamLossPattern can misalign the aperture around the beam trajectory to take into account for the offset between aperture centre and circulating beam. This requires loading and external "survey file" with the corresponding offsets as a function of the longitudinal coordinate along the accelerator. Example scripts to generate such files are given below.

 

Treatment of the crossing angle/separation schemes

Similarly to the previous case, separation and crossing schemes [ref to LHC design report] can also be taken into account. The main difference with respect to the orbit survey is that the crossing and separation kicker can be included in the tracking tools (this is indeed the case for SixTrack) and in this case it not necessary to add off-line the offsets to the particles' trajectories.

An internal flag (_X_), set to .FALSE. as default, is available in BeamLossPattern to switch on and off this option. The inpu files with the information on the crossing/separation schemes are generated similarly to the survey files, as discussed below.

 

Saving the trajectories of lost particles

It is possible to save the trajectories of all lost particles. In order to save disk space, only the trajectory of the last turn is recorded.
Trajectories are saved by setting to 1 the internal flag _SaveLost_, which is set to zero by default.

 

Calculation of the number of surviving turns

BeamLossPattern calculates the number of surviving turns before the halo particles hit the aperture. This is given as a standard output in the last column of the beam loss files.


BeamLossPattern users's manual

Required inputs:

  1. Aperture model files (latest versions: inj, lowb)
  2. Survey files with (latest versions: inj, lowb)
  3. Halo files (see format of the SixTrack output tracks2.dat)

Command line (all the above inputs must be in the same directory):

BeamLossPattern Energy Halo.File Output.Name Aperture.File

Energy --------> "inj" or "lowb" (used to identify the survey file)
Halo.File -----> File with all particle trajectories ("tracks2.dat" output of SixTrack)
Output.Name ---> Desired name for the output (can be any string)
Aperture.File -> Aperture model file. E.g.: "allaper_inj_20050322.b1"

Standard outputs
LP_Output.Name.s ---> Loss Pattern (losses checked at the locations of magnets)
LPI_Output.Name.s --> Loss Pattern with 10 cm spatial resolution (interpolation)

The output files has basically the same format has the input halo file. The only difference is that the last column know gives the number of surviving turns for each particle, i.e. the number of turn between the interaction with the primary collimators and the turn when the particle is lost.

Remarks

(1) Format of halo file (example)

The halo files generated by SixTrack contains the following 9 columns:
1 -> Particle number
2 -> Turn number
3 -> Longitudinal coordinate (s)
4 -> Horizontal position (x)
5 -> Horizontal derivative (x')
6 -> Vertical position(y)
7 -> Vertical derivative (y')
8 -> Energy error
9 -> Halo type flag

For the program to function properly, it is mandatory that each halo particle is univocally identified by a particle number, which must be between 0 and 30000 (Np parameter in the source). This upper value can be changed in the source code.
The particle number is used to follow the trajectory of each particle in the output files that typically mixes lines corresponding to different particles (at each lattice elements, the coordinate of all tracked particles are written. The trajectory of a single particle is therefore not appears in the file as a continuous series of consecutive lines).

It is noted that the format of the numbers in the halo file is not important, provided that each line contains 9 "words". By default, the first line is a header and is disregarded in the analysis.

(2) Survey files
The "survey" files are generated as a spline interpolation of MADX survey files (see examples: MADX survey, MADX twiss and required shell script). The calculations are carried out with a Matlab script that converts the survey trajectory into an offset of the aperture for the D1, D2, D3 and D4 magnets around the ring. The procedure is delicate

(3) Flags that can be set internally (require recompilation) -> See also here.

  1. _S_ [=1]--------> Apply Survey correction as read in survey file (ON by default)
  2. _X_ [=0]--------> Apply correction from crossing/separation as read from survey file
  3. Np [=30000]-----> Maximum value of particle number
  4. Dl [=0.1]-------> Spatial resolution of interpolated beam losses
  5. _SaveLost_ [=0]-> Save the last turn of the trajectory of each lost particle

Source files - executables

Zipped file with code source and makefile: BeamLossPattern.tgz (Uncompress with 'gtar')

Compiled executables:

  1. Linux RedHat 7.3 [ g++ 2.96 ]
  2. CERN Scientific Linux [ g++ 3.2.3 ]
  3. Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Panther) [ g++ 3.3 ]
  4. Windows XP (not yet available)

 


Auxiliary programs

1) CountAbs (input naming conventions specific for LHC simultion setup)

This program is used to count the number of "real" impacts on the collmator jaws all around the ring. Particles that, according to the SixTrack calculations, interact with the collimators might instead have reached aperture bottlenecks before hitting the collimators jaws. Therefore, these particles must be disregarded in the counting of impacts/absorptions on the collimators.
This analysis is needed because the aperture information is not included in SixTrack, which will keep tracking particles that in reality might already be lost.

It is noted that the contribution of "fake" collimator impacts is very small because the collimation system is designed such that the collimator are the closet elements to the beam. Typically, a few percent of the total impacts at most are "fake". Nevertheless, with CountAbs it can now taken into account.

Source.cpp (stand-alone code, just compile with 'g++')

How to run it -The command line looks like "CountAbs SeedNumber Halo Energy Optics"
(Input/output names specific for the LHC simulation setup - changes of the source required for other cases)

Default input names:
all_absorption.SeedNumber.Halo.EN.Optics.dat -> SixTrack output with absorbed particles
LPI_BeamLoss.SeedNumber.Halo.EN.Optics.s -> BeamLossPattern output with location of losses

Default output name:
all_absorption.SeedNumber.Halo.EN.Optics.real.dat
all_absorption.SeedNumber.Halo.EN.Optics.fake.dat

Input options:
SeedNumber -> number of seed used to submit the job
Halo -> Halo type: 'hori', 'vert', or 'skew'
EN -> Beam energy: 'inj' or 'lowb'
Optics -> optics: '450', 'coll', 'allcoll', 'nocoll', 'injopt'

2) CleanInelastic

The SixTrack version with collimation can provide the locations of inelastic impacts of protons with the collimator jaws, which are used as an input for energy deposition studies. As discussed above, the SixTrack output can overestimate the number of impacts in a given collimator because it does not disregard the particles hitting the ring aperture before reaching the collimator (no aperture checks are carried out during the tracking). Similarly to CountAbs, CleanInelastic cleans up the "fake" inelastic impacts from the SixTrack output.

Note that several input files are required to reconstruct the longitudinal position of the collimators in the sequence because of the collimator numbering used in SixTrack (which in principle can vary from run to run).

Source.cpp (stand-alone code, just compile with 'g++')

How to run it: "CleanInelastic Impact.file Loss.file CollPosition coll_summary.dat"

Inputs:
Impact.file -> SixTrack output with inelastic impacts ("FLUKA_impacts.dat")
Loss.file -> Loss maps as produced by BeamLossPattern
CollPosition -> File with the collimator positions (example)
coll_summary.dat -> Standard SixTrack summary output (example)

Outputs: impacts_fake.dat, impacts_real.dat

Example of the usage of CleanInelastic: trasnverse scatter plot of inelastic impacts at the first secondary collimator of IR7 (TCSG.A6L7) before (left) and after (right) correction of "fake" impacts (simulations at injection) [Get EPS file].

 

3) GetAperture

For a given lattice and aperture model, this program produces an ascii files with the aperture every 10 cm all along the beam line. Aperture values are given at three different azimuthal angles: 0, pi/4 and pi/2.

Source .cpp (compile with 'make GetAperture' - same makefile of BeamLossPattern)

How to run it: "GetAperture ApertureModel.file" (e.g. "-> GetAperture allaper_inj_20050322.b1")

Input: Aperture model input file, as it is used by BeamLossPattern
Output: "LHCAperture.dat" (~15 MB ascii file)


Examples of simulation results (preliminary)

In the following plots, the losses are given in unit of local cleaning inefficiency.

Loss maps at injection energy (horizontal halo - 5000000 tracked particles).

 

Losses at IR7 and downstream dispersion suppressor (zoom of the above plot).

 

Loss maps at top energy, with all tertiary collimators at their nominal settings (horizontal halo - 5000000 tracked particles).

Losses in IR7 and downstream dispersion suppressor - 7 TeV(Zoom of the above plot).

 

Transverse impact distributions at the triplet of IR

Horizontal and vertical beta functions (without TCT's!!).

Longitudinal distribution of losses (without TCT's!!).

Transverse scatter plot of the losses at the superconducting triplet of IR1 (without TCT's!!).

 


References/recent talks

  1. Talk at the external review of the LHC collimation project.
    S.Redaelli, LHC aperture and collimation settings
  2. EPAC2004, contributed paper on performance of the LHC collimation system
    R. Assman at al., Expected performance of the LHC collimation system
  3. Chamonix2005
    S. Redaelli, LHC aperture and commissioning of the LHC collimation system, talk and paper
  4. Workshop on beam generated heat deposition and quench levels
    G. Robert-Demolaize,
  5. External review of the LHC Machine Protection system
    S. Redaelli, Beam losses versus BLM locations at the LHC
  6. PAC2005, G. Robert-Demolaize et al., Simulation tools for collimation studies

Updated aperture model for optics version V6.500 [May 2006]

Summary of recent changes of the aperture model:

  • The model is now available also for BEAM 2!
  • Model with the REAL beam screen sizes (without tolerance of the "banana shape") is also available!
  • Implementation of the correct length of the BPMs (all types) was passed to the layout database guys and can now be extracted automatically in a MADX compatible format (marker definitions).

In addition, the following minor changes were also implemented:

  • Few minor bugs of the beam screens were corrected (errors of database information with respect to the specs)
  • Updated information on TAS aperture

The status of the model was disussed at the ABP-LOC meeting of Feb. 14, 2006. See details in the slides presented by SR. In particular, note that the status of the warm elements and of the detector regions are not yet suitable for an automated extraction from the database into MADX format. The model is then still based on my scripts generated "manually" from the information collected from drawings and specification documents.

An updated set of sources for BeamLoss Patterns is also available but it is not yet published on this page. If you need the new tools (that also work for beam 2!), contact directly the author (mailto SR).

New aperture files (unzip with "gunzip2"):

  • Model for Beam 1 and Beam 2 (called beam "4") with the nominal beam screep aperture including tolerance;
  • Model for Beam 1 and Beam 2 with the real beam screen sizes.

Only the Twiss outputs are given here - the MADX source scripts are available on the AFS optics repository of V6.500.

 

Minor update (16/11/2007): manual correction of a couples of errors. The links to the Twiss have been updated.


 

  Stefano Redaelli, Thursday, 05. April 2012 11:07 +0200