Development and testing of a Cherenkov beam loss monitor in CLEAR facility

Beam Loss Monitors are fundamental diagnostic systems in particle accelerators. Beam losses are measured by a wide range of detectors with excellent results; most of these devices are used to measure local beam losses. However, in some accelerators there is the need to measure beam losses continuously localized over longer distances i.e., several tens of meters. For this reason, a beam loss detector based on long optical fibres is now under study. As part of the design, several simulations, comparing different possible detection scenarios, have been performed in FLUKA and bench-marked with experimental data. An experimental campaign was performed with an electron beam in the CERN Linear Electron Accelerator for Research (CLEAR) in November 2020. The light emitted from the optical fibre was captured using Silicon Photo-Multipliers (SiPM) coupled at each fibre’s end. In this poster, the first results of a beam loss detector based on the capture of Cherenkov photons generated by charged particles inside multimode silica fibres are presented