The irrad proton irradiation facility control, data management and beam diagnostic systems: an outlook of the major upgrades beyond the cern long shutdown 2∗

The IRRAD proton irradiation facility at CERN was built during the Long Shutdown 1 (LS1) to address the irradiation experiment needs of the community working for the HighLuminosity (HL) upgrade of the LHC. The present IRRAD is an upgrade of a historical service at CERN that, since the 90’s, exploits the high-intensity 24 GeV/c PS proton beam for radiation-hardness studies of detector, accelerator and semiconductor components and materials. During its first run (2015-2018), IRRAD provided a key service to the CERN community, with more than 2500 samples irradiated. IRRAD is operated via custom-made irradiation systems, beam diagnostics and data management tools. During the Long Shutdown 2 (LS2), IRRAD will undergo several upgrades in order to cope also with new requirements arising for projects beyond the HL-LHC. In this paper, we (1) describe the various hardware and software equipment developed for IRRAD, and (2) present the main challenges encountered during the first years of operation, which have driven most of the improvements planned for LS2 such as applying machine-learning techniques in the processing and real-time analysis of beam profile data.