Beam-Matter Heating Experiments at the CERN HiRadMat Facility and its Implications

Experiments have been performed at the CERN HiRadMat (High Radiation to Materials) facility to study heating of extended solid copper cylindrical targets by the 440 GeV proton beam delivered by the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS). These experiments have established the existance of the "hydrodynamic tunneling" of ultra relavistic protons through matter [1]. The experimental measurements show very good agreement with the numerical simulations [2]. This is a very important result from the machine protection point of view because the range of the protons and their hadronic shower increases substantially due to this effect. For example, numerical simulations have shown that the static range of a single 7 TeV LHC proton in solid copper is about 1 m, whereas the penetration length of the full beam becomes around 30 m, when hydrodynamics is included [3]. This effect will be much more pronounced in the case of the 50 TeV proton beam to be generated by the Future Circular Collider (FCC). Recent simulations indicate that such a beam can penetrate up to few hundred m in solid material. The HiRadMat experiments have shown that the SPS beam has sufficient energy to melt and evaporate the target while the numerical simulations indicate that the beam heated part of the target material is coverted into Warm Dense Matter (WDM) state. The HiRadMat facility can therefore be very useful to study the problem of WDM! [1] R. Schmidt, J. Blanco Sancho, F. Burkart, D. Grenier, D. Wollmann, N.A. Tahir, A. Shutov and A.R. Piriz, Phys. Plasmas 21 (2014) 080701. [2] N.A. Tahir, F. Burkart, A. Shutov, R. Schmidt, D. Wollmann and A.R. Piriz, Phys. Rev. E 90 (2014) 063112. [3] N.A. Tahir, J. Sancho Blanco, A. Shutov, R. Schmidt and A.R. Piriz, PRSTAB 15 (2012) 051003.