FARADAY CUP AWARD: High Sensitivity Tune Measurement using Direct Diode Detection

Direct Diode Detection (3D) is a technique developed at CERN initially for the LHC tune measurement system, to reach a sensitivity allowing observation of beam betatron oscillations with amplitudes below a micrometre. In this technique simple peak diode detectors are used to convert short beam pulses from a beam position pick-up into slowly varying signals. Their DC components, constituting a large background related to beam offsets, are suppressed by series capacitors, while the small signals related to beam oscillations are passed to the subsequent stages for amplification and filtering. As the demodulated beam oscillation signals are already in the kHz range, their processing is simple and they can be digitised with high resolution audio ADCs. This paper presents the history as well as the adventures of the 3D development and prototyping, along with some technical details. It documents a very efficient collaboration between CERN and Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), with contributions from other laboratories. This paper is also meant as a reminder that for some applications even simple analogue signal processing can be far more efficient than the presently common “digitise-itimmediately” approach and that old good ideas should never be forgotten