A prototype high power pulse generator for the beam abort systems of CERN´s proposed 8 TeV collider LHC

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be equipped with a beam abort system, able to rapidly and safely dispose of the beams at the end of a storage period and also in all emergency situations. The authors report on a prototype pulse generator to power the kicker magnets which extract the beam out of the LHC. The generators must produce a current pulse amplitude of up to 20 kA, a risetime of about 2 μs, and a flat-top duration of 89 μs. They are composed of fast pulse capacitors discharged by gas switches, high di/dt crowbar diode stacks, and thyristor-controlled current compensation networks. A simplified prototype generator has been constructed to very several important device characteristics, especially the turn-on behavior of the freewheel diodes and the turn-off properties of the blocking diodes. Some test results on the prototype are presented