LHC collimation: design and results from prototyping and beam tests

The problem of collimation and beam cleaning is one of the most challenging aspects of the LHC project. A collimation system must be designed, built, installed and commissioned with parameters that extend the present state-of-the-art by 2-3 orders of magnitude. Problems include robustness, cleaning efficiency, impedance and operational aspects. A strong design effort has been performed at CERN over the last two years. The adopted phased approach is described. Robust and precisely controllable collimators have been designed. Several LHC prototype collimators have been built and tested with the highest beam intensities that are presently available at CERN. The successful beam tests are presented, including beam-based setup procedures, a 2 MJ robustness test and measurements of the collimator-induced impedance. Finally, an outlook is presented on the challenges that are ahead in the coming year

The final collimation system for the LHC

The LHC collimation system has been re-designed over in order to address the unprecedented challenges that are faced with the 360 MJ beams at 7 TeV. The layout of the LHC has now been frozen and a final approach for collimation and cleaning has been adopted. In total 132 pure collimator locations have been reserved in the two LHC rings and can be installed in a phased approach. Up to 88 collimators of five different types will be available for initial beam operation. The system has been fully optimized for avoiding beam-induced quenches of superconducting magnets and for sufficient survival of beamline components against radioactive dose. The phased approach for LHC collimation is described, the various collimators and their functionalities are explained, and the expected system performance is summarized

First cleaning with LHC collimators

The LHC has two dedicated cleaning insertions: IR3 for momentum cleaning and IR7 for betatron cleaning. The collimation system has been specified and built with tight mechanical tolerances (e.g. jaw flatness ~ 40 μm ) and is designed to achieve a high accuracy and reproducibility of the jaw positions (~ 20 μm). The practically achievable cleaning efficiency of the present Phase-I system depends on the precision of the jaw centering around the beam, the accuracy of the gap size and the jaw parallelism against the beam. The reproducibility and stability of the collimation system is important to avoid the frequent repetition of beam based alignment which is currently a lengthy procedure. Within this paper we describe the method used for the beam based alignment of the LHC collimation system, its achieved accuracy and stability and its performance at 450GeV