Spatial and temporal beam profiles for the LHC using synchrotron light

Synchrotron radiation is emitted whenever a beam of charged particles passes though a magnetic field. The power emitted is strongly dependent on the relativistic Lorentz factor of the particles, which itself is proportional to the beam energy and inversely proportional to the particle rest mass. Thus, synchrotron radiation is usually associated with electron accelerators, which are commonly used as light sources. However the largest proton machines reach sufficiently high energies to make synchrotron light useful for diagnostic purposes. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN will accelerate protons up to an energy of 7TeV. An optical arrangement has been made which focuses synchrotron light from two LHC magnets to image the cross-section of the beam. It is also planned to use this setup to produce a longitudinal profile of the beam by use of fast Single Photon Counting. This is complicated by the bunched nature of the beam which needs to be measured with a very large dynamic range. In this contribution we present early experimental data of the transverse LHC beam profile together with a scheme for measuring the longitudinal profile with a time resolution of 50 ps. It includes the use of a gating regime to increase the dynamic range of the photon counter and a three-stage correction algorithm to compensate for the detector's deadtime, afterpulsing and pile-up effects.