Dealing with abort kicker prefire in the Superconducting Super Collider

The Superconducting Super Collider uses a single-turn extraction abort system to divert the circulating beam to a massive graphite absorber at normal termination of the operating cycle or in case of any of a number of predefined fault modes. The Collider rings must be designed to be tolerant to abort extraction kicker prefires and misfires because of the large circulating beam energy. We have studied the consequences of beam loss in the accelerator due to such prefires and misfires in terms of material heating and radiation generation using full scale machine simulations and Monte-Carlo energy deposition calculations. Some results from these calculations as well as possible protective measures for minimizing the damaging effects of kicker prefire and misfire are discussed in this paper