Measuring the Aperture and Locating Beam Obstructions in the Fermilab Accelerator

A method which uses the coasting beam at the injection energy to scan the aperture in a large accelerator such as the Main Accelerator at Fermilab will be described. This scanning procedure serves two purposes. It provides a record of the aperture size around the entire accelerator which can be used for future reference and comparison. And it is highly useful in locating beam obstructions which may be caused by a collapsed vacuum chamber or some small object in the chamber to within a few meters. A high degree of accuracy has been achieved in finding and removing even very small obstructions. This method uses several computer programs, the main accelerator correction dipoles and beam position detectors, and some simple calculations.