• CERN
• Large Hadron Collider of CERN
• lhc
• measurement
• radiation
• RadMon (Radiation Monitoring system) sensors
• sensor

This work contains the results of an analysis of the radiation levels in the Large Hadron Collider of CERN measured by the RadMon (Radiation Monitoring system) sensors.
CERN provides particle accelerators and detectors to accelerate beams of particles and observe their collisions. LHC is the accelerator where the highest energy experiments are installed. The unprecedented beam intensity and energy together with the physical dimensions of the collider (a 27 km long ring located in a tunnel 100m below the surface level) and the amount of equipment involved make it unique in the world. One of the major issues for availability has historically been equipment faults and long term degradation due to radiation effect on the electronics. The R2E project (Radiation to Electronics) began its activities in 2008 with the target of reducing the beam dumps due to radiation effects to electronics.
In the framework of this project, radiation levels monitoring takes an important role and the RadMon sensor was developed and installed in LHC. This thesis contains some results of the data extraction from these sensors, with particular emphasis on the improvements of the most recent iteration of the RadMon, called V6.
A brief overview of the most relevant effects of radiation to modern electronics and an illustration of the peculiarities of the challenges posed by LHC forego a detailed physical description of the sensor and a comparison of the specifications of the V5 and V6 iterations.
The CERN's accelerator control stack is then presented including some modification to the CERN-wide acquisition software performed as part of this work in order to retrieve the data from the CERN logging system. Some of the software used during the commissioning is illustrated. The operational status monitoring is then described, showing some data from 2018.
In the final chapter, some results of the mesaurements are shown: a first distributed measurement of the R-factor (made possible by the V6 sensors) for the LHC tunnel is presented. The baseline sensitivity to TID in the tunnel is vastly improved by the new ADC. An overview of the factors that allow the results normalization and to simulate the radiation levels is included.