In the years 2009-2013 the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been operated with the top beam energies of 3.5 TeV and 4 TeV per proton (from 2012) instead of the nominal 7 TeV. The currents in the superconducting magnets were reduced accordingly. To date only seventeen beam-induced quenches have occurred; eight of them during specially designed quench tests, the others during injection. There has not been a single beaminduced quench during normal collider operation with stored beam. The conditions, however, are expected to become much more challenging after the long LHC shutdown. The magnets will be operating at near nominal currents, and in the presence of high energy and high intensity beams with a stored energy of up to 362 MJ per beam. In this paper we summarize our efforts to understand the quench levels of LHC superconducting magnets. We describe beam-loss events and dedicated experiments with beam, as well as the simulation methods used to reproduce the observable signals. The simulated energy deposition in the coils is compared to the quench levels predicted by electro-thermal models, thus allowing to validate and improve the models which are used to set beam-dump thresholds on beam-loss monitors for Run 2.
Collimation with hollow electron beams or lenses (HEL) is currently one of the most promising concepts for active halo control in HL-LHC. In previous studies it has been shown that the halo can be efficiently removed with a hollow electron lens. Equally important as an efficient removal of the halo, is to demonstrate that the core stays unperturbed. In the case of an ideal hollow electron lens without bends, the field at the location of the beam core vanishes and the core remains unperturbed. In reality, the field at the beam core does not vanish entirely due to imperfections in the electron beam profile and the electron lens bends necessary to guide the electron in and out of the proton aperture. In particular, in the case of a pulsed operation of the electron lens the non-vanishing residual field induces noise on the proton beam. To identify the most sensitive pulsing patterns for the resonant mode and derive tolerances on the profile imperfections, a first MD was carried out of which the first results are presented in this note.
The High-Luminosity LHC Project aims to increase the integrated luminosity that will be collected by the Large Hadron Collider for the needs of the high energy physics frontier by the end of its Run 3 by more than a factor ten. This will require doubling the beam intensity, and in order to ensure coherent stability until the brighter beams are put in collision, the transverse impedance of the machine has to be reduced. As the major portion of the ring impedance is generated by its collimation system, several low resistivity jaw materials have been considered to lower the collimator impedance and a special collimator has been built and installed in the machine to study their effect. In order to assess the performance of each material we performed a series of tune shift measurements with LHC beams. The results show a significant reduction of the resistive wall tune shift with novel materials, in good agreement with the impedance model and the bench impedance and resistivity measurements. The largest improvement is obtained with a molybdenum coating of a molybdenum-graphite jaw. This coating, applied to the most critical collimators, is estimated to lower the machine impedance by up to 30% and the stabilizing Landau octupole threshold by up to 240 A after accounting for uncertainties of the model and other destabilising effects. A half of the overall improvement can be obtained by coating the jaws of a subset of 4 out of 11 collimators identified as the highest contributors to machine impedance. This subset of low-impedance collimators is being installed during the Long
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