Development of a beam condition monitor for use in experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider using synthetic diamond

The CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will collide two counter rotating proton beams, each with a store energy about 350MJ; enough to melt 550kg of copper. If there is failure in an element of the accelerator, the resulting beam losses could cause damage not only to the machine but also to the experiments. A Beam Condition Monitor (BCM) is foreseen to monitor last increments of particle flux near the interaction point and if necessary, to generate an abort signal to the LHC accelerator control, to dump the beams. Due to its radiation hardness and minimal services requirements, synthetic CVD diamond is being considered as BCM sensor option.