THE CLIC MACHINE PROTECTION

INTRODUCTION The proposed Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) [1, 2] is based on a two-beam acceleration scheme. The energy of two high-intensity, low-energy drive beams is extracted and transferred to the two low-intensity, high-energy main beams. The machine protection has to cope with a wide variety of failures, from real-time failures (RF breakdowns, kicker misfiring), to slow equipment failures, to beam instabilities (caused by e.g. temperature drifts, slow ground motions). Due to the many different types of accelerator components and the beams of various characteristics throughout the entire complex, the CLIC machine protection is an extensive subject. The machine protection has the mission to protect the various machine components from damage caused by ill controlled beams. The severity of the damage is given by the financial impact of the damage and the reduction in the operational availability of the facility. The risk equivalent is given by the product of the fault rate and the impact of the fault (i.e. in statistical terms: risk is the expectation value of the fault impact). This concept is illustrated by some examples for downtime in Table 1.