Beam steering performance of bent silicon crystals irradiated with high-intensity and high-energy protons

Beam steering performance of bent silicon crystals irradiated with high-intensity and high-energy protons has been studied. In particular, crystals of the type used for collimation and extraction purposes in the Large Hadron Collider and the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN have been irradiated at the HiRadMat CERN facility with \(2.5 \times 10^{13}\) 440 GeV/c protons, with a pulse length of 7.2 \(\upmu \)s. The purpose is to study possible changes in bending angle and channeling efficiency due to thermo-mechanical stresses in case of accidental irradiation during accelerator operations. A comparison between measurements performed before and after the irradiation does not show any appreciable performance reduction in either crystal.