“…The present official schedule of the LHC foresees a continuation of the heavy-ion program throughout Run 3, scheduled to take place in 2022-2025, and Run 4, presently planned for 2029-2032, with mainly one-month runs of Pb-Pb or p-Pb collisions per year. A detailed baseline operational scenario has been worked out [68], relying on an improved production scheme in the injectors that allows reducing the bunch spacing to 50 ns from the previously used 75 ns [69], as well as upgrades of the collimation system [70,71]. A range of LHC filling patterns has been worked out, with different distributions of the collisions between, on the one hand, the ALICE, ATLAS, and CMS experiments, and on the other, the LHCb experiment [68].…”