Training Behavior of the Main Dipoles in the Large Hadron Collider

In 2015, the 1232 Nb-Ti dipole magnets in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have been commissioned to 7.8 T operational field, with 172 quenches. More than 80% of these quenches occurred in the magnets of one of the three cold mass assemblers (3000 series), confirming what was already observed in 2008. In this paper, the recent analysis carried out on the quench performance of the Large Hadron Collider dipole magnets is reported, including the individual reception tests and the 2008 and 2015 commissioning campaigns, to better understand the above-mentioned anomaly and give an outlook for future operation and possible increase of the operational field. The lower part of the quench probability spectrum is compatible with Gaussian distributions; therefore, the training curve can be fit through error functions. An essential ingredient in this analysis is the estimate of the error to be associated with the training data due to sampling of rare events, allowing to test different hypothesis. Using this approach, an estimate of the number of quenches required to reach 8.3 T (corresponding to the 7 TeV nominal energy) is given, and we propose to have two LHC sectors trained toward this target before the next warm up of the LHC.