Status of the pacman project

PACMAN, a study on Particle Accelerator Components' Metrology and Alignment to the Nanometre scale, is an Innovative Doctoral Programme, funded by the European Commission, hosted by CERN, providing a high quality training to 10 Early Stage Researchers (ESR) working towards a PhD. It is a multi-disciplinary project covering diverse fields such as beam instrumentation, magnetic measurements, metrology, high accuracy alignment and high precision mechanics. The objective of the PACMAN project is to propose new methods allowing the determination of the reference axis of accelerator components w.r.t. external alignment targets (fiducialisation process). A test bench, using components of the Compact LInear Collider (CLIC) study, will demonstrate the feasibility of the solutions developed and that a micrometric accuracy of their fiducialisation process can be reached. The results of this study, which has started in September 2013, are detailed. They concern the methods developed using a stretched wire to determine: the magnetic axis of small aperture magnets, the electrical centre of a 15 GHz Radio Frequency-Beam Position Monitor (RF-BPM) and the electro-magnetic axis of an accelerating cavity. They integrate also the solutions carried out to measure the position of the wire w.r.t. the external alignment targets. Other systems developed in the frame of the project are also taken into account: a nanopositioning system to validate the nanometric resolution of the BPM and a dedicated seismic sensor to characterize the environment during the measurements. (author)