Resistivity Characterization of Molybdenum-Coated Graphite-Based Substrates for High-Luminosity LHC Collimators

The High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) project aims at extending the operability of the LHC by another decade and increasing by more than a factor of ten the integrated luminosity that the LHC will have collected by the end of Run 3. This will require doubling the beam intensity and reducing the transverse beam size compared to those of the LHC design. The higher beam brightness poses new challenges for machine safety, due to the large energy of 700 MJ stored in the beams, and for beam stability, mainly due to the collimator contribution to the total LHC beam coupling impedance. A rich research program was therefore started to identify suitable materials and collimator designs, not only fulfilling impedance reduction requirements but also granting adequate beam-cleaning and robustness against failures. The use of thin molybdenum coatings on a molybdenum–graphite substrate has been identified as the most promising solution to meet both collimation and impedance requirements, and it is now the baseline choice of the HL-LHC project. In this work we present the main results of the coating characterization, in particular addressing the impact of coating microstructure on the electrical resistivity with different techniques, from Direct Current (DC) to GHz frequency range