Development of a CVD diamond Beam Condition Monitor for CMS at the Large Hadron Collider

The CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will store 2808 bunches per colliding beam, with each bunch consisting of 1011 protons at an energy of 7 TeV. If there is a failure in an element of the accelerator, the resulting beam losses could cause damage not only to the machine but also to the experiments. A Beam Condition Monitor (BCM) is foreseen to monitor fast increments of particle fluxes near the interaction point and, if necessary, to generate an abort signal to the LHC accelerator control to dump the beams. The system is being developed initially for the CMS experiment but it is sufficiently general to find potential applications elsewhere. Due to its high radiation hardness, CVD diamond was chosen for investigation as the BCM sensor. Various samples of CVD diamond have been characterized extensively with both a 90Sr source and in high-intensity test beams in order to assess the capabilities of such sensors and to study whether this detector technology is suitable for a BCM system. A selection of results from these investigations is presented.