A High Power Pulse System for the Beam Extraction from CERN's Large Hadron Collider

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is close to starting operation of the large hadron collider (LHC). A beam dumping system must protect the LHC machine from damage, by reliably and safely extracting and absorbing the circulating beams when requested. For this purpose a beam extraction system has been designed, built, installed and tested. It is composed of 15 fast kicker magnets per beam line to extract the particles in one turn of the collider. Each magnet is powered by a dedicated pulse generator through special low impedance coaxial cables. The generator charging voltage is proportional to the beam momentum, which is 450 GeV/c at injection and will be 7 TeV/c at top energy. The current pulse has a maximum amplitude of 19 kA with a rise time of 2.8degs and a fall time of 2 ms; the first 89degs of the fall time are used to dump the beam. Each kicker magnet consists of a window frame of Si-Fe tape wound cores and high voltage insulated single turn conductors. They are built around a ceramic vacuum chamber which is metallized on the inside. The measures taken to ensure a high reliability of the system, which was one of the main considerations during the design, construction and testing of the system, are discussed. Results of measurements on the series systems are presented.