Welcome, Eleftherios !
We are pleased to welcome Eleftherios Skordis to the QUASAR Group as international PhD student based at CERN. Eleftherios will be studying the collimation system for energy frontier accelerators (i.e. LHC, HL-LHC, FCC), from the scope of particle shower development inside and outside of the collimators themselves. Eleftherios has a diploma from the school of Applied Sciences (mathematics and physics), with specialisation on “Nuclear and High Energy Physics”, and a master's degree in “Physics and Technological Applications”, both at the National Technical University of Athens. In September 2012, Eleftherios was offered a fellow position in the FLUKA group at CERN. For 3 years he performed a substantial number of studies of different elements of the LHC accelerator.
The upgrade of the LHC energy and brightness, from the 2015 restart at close to design energy until the HLLHC era with considerable hardware development and layout renewal, poses tight challenges in terms of machine protection. The collimation insertions and especially the one dedicated to betatron cleaning (IR7), where most of the beam halo is intercepted to spare from losses the cold sectors of the ring, will be subject to a significant increase of radiation load, whose leakage to the nearby dispersion suppressors must be kept sustainable.
The main goal of Eleftherios’s studies will be to identify possible limitations and weaknesses of the collimations system for both protons and ions through Monte Carlo simulations (using the FLUKA and SIXTRACK) and to benchmark the simulations by comparing with experimental data (e.g. Beam Loss Monitor signal comparison in the LHC).
Over 400 meters of the FLUKA model of the IR7 warm section.