Measurement of the Residual Resistivity Ratio of the busbars copper stabilizer of the 13kA circuits of the LHC

After the incident of September 2008, the operational beam energy of the LHC has been set to 3.5 TeV, since not all joints of the superconducting busbars between magnets have the required quality for 7 TeV operation. This choice is based on simulations to determine the safe current in the main dipole and quadrupole magnets, reproducing the thermal behavior of a quenched superconducting joint by taking into account all relevant factors that affect a possible thermal runaway. One important parameter of the simulation is the RRR (Residual Resistivity Ratio) of the copper stabilizer of the busbar connecting superconducting magnets. A dedicated campaign to measure this quantity for the main 13kA circuits of the LHC on all sectors was performed during the Christmas stop in December 2010 and January 2011. The measurement method as well as the data analysis and results are presented in this note