Quench antennas for RHIC quadrupole magnets

Quench antennas for RHIC quadrupole magnets are being developed jointly by KEK and BNL. A quench antenna is a device to localize a quench origin using arrays of pick-up coils lined up along the magnet bore. Each array contains four pick-up coils: sensitive to normal sextupole, skew sextupole, normal octupole, and skew octupole field. This array configuration allows an azimuthal localization of a quench front while a series of arrays gives an axial localization and a quench propagation velocity. Several antennas have been developed for RHIC magnets and they are now routinely used for quench tests of production magnets. The paper discusses the description of the method and introduces a measured example using an antenna designed for quadrupole magnets