Operational considerations on the stability of colliding beams

While well studied in the absence of beam-beam and while colliding head-on, the stability of the LHC beams can be very critical in intermediate steps. During the squeeze, the long-range beam-beam interaction becomes a critical component of the beam's dynamics. Also, while the transverse separation at the interaction points is collapsed, the beam-beam forces change drastically, possibly deteriorating the beam's stability. Finally, during luminosity production, the configuration of the LHC in 2012 included few bunches without head-on collision in any of the interaction points having different stability properties. Stability diagrams are being evaluated numerically in these configurations in an attempt to explain instabilities observed in these phases during the 2012 proton run of the LHC.Comment: 5 pages, contribution to the ICFA Mini-Workshop on Beam-Beam Effects in Hadron Colliders, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, 18-22 Mar 201

Stability diagram of colliding beams

The effect of the beam-beam interactions on the stability of impedance mode is discussed. The detuning is evaluated by the means of single particle tracking in arbitrarily complex collision configurations, including lattice non-linearities, and used to numerically evaluate the dispersion integral. This approach also allows the effect of non-Gaussian distributions to be considered. Distributions modified by the action of external noise are discussed.Comment: 5 pages, contribution to the ICFA Mini-Workshop on Beam-Beam Effects in Hadron Colliders, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, 18-22 Mar 201

Beam-beam and impedance

As two counter-rotating beams interact they can give rise to coherent dipole modes. Under the influence of impedance these coherent beam-beam modes can couple to higher order head-tail modes and lead to strong instabilities. A fully self-consistent approach including beam-beam and impedance was used to characterize this new coupled mode instability and study possible cures such as a transverse damper and high chromaticity.Comment: 9 pages, contribution to the ICFA Mini-Workshop on Beam-Beam Effects in Hadron Colliders, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, 18-22 Mar 201

Observations of beam-beam effects at the LHC

This paper introduces a list of observations related to the beam-beam interaction that were collected over the first years of LHC proton physics operation (2010-12). Beam-beam related effects not only have been extensively observed and recorded, but have also shaped the operation of the LHC for high-intensity proton running in a number of ways: the construction of the filling scheme, the choice of luminosity levelling techniques, measures to mitigate instabilities, and the choice of settings for improving performance (e.g. to reduce losses), among others.Comment: Presented at the ICFA Mini-Workshop on Beam-Beam in Hadron Colliders, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, 18-22 March 201

Long Range Beam-beam Effects in the LHC

We report on the experience with long-range beam--beam effects in the LHC, in dedicated studies as well as the experience from operation. Where possible, we compare the observations with the expectations.Comment: Presented at the ICFA Mini-Workshop on Beam-Beam in Hadron Colliders, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, 18-22 March 201

Coherent beam-beam mode in the LHC

Observations of single bunch beam-beam coherent modes during dedicated experiments in the LHC are presented. Their role in standard operation for physics is discussed and, in particular, candidates of beam-beam coherent mode driven unstable by the machine impedance are presented.Comment: 4 pages, contribution to the ICFA Mini-Workshop on Beam-Beam Effects in Hadron Colliders, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, 18-22 Mar 201

Feed forward in the LHC

The LHC operational cycle is comprised of several phases such as the ramp, the squeeze and stable beams. During the ramp and squeeze in particular, it has been ob- served that the behaviour of key LHC beam parameters such as tune, orbit and chromaticity is highly reproducible from fill to fill. To reduce the reliance on the crucial feed- back systems, it was decided to perform fill-to-fill feed- forward corrections. The LHC feed-forward application was developed to ease the introduction of corrections to the operational settings. The LHC Feed-Forward software has been used during LHC commissioning and tune and orbit corrections during ramp and squeeze have been suc- cessfully applied. As a result, the required real-time cor- rections for the above parameters have been reduced to a minimum. In parallel, successful trials have been made to apply feedforward corrections before commissioning with beam which are based on M AD - X simulation scans over the unused setting functions. In this paper we present the evolution of feedforward for the LHC and discuss further improvements of this software

Coalescence Behavior of Gold Nanoparticles

The tetraoctylammonium bromide (TOAB)-stabilized gold nanoparticles have been successfully fabricated. After an annealing of the as-synthesized nanoparticles at 300 °C for 30 min, the coalescence behavior of gold nanoparticles has been investigated using high-resolution transmission electron microscopy in detail. Two types of coalescence, one being an ordered combination of two or more particles in appropriate orientations through twinning, and the other being an ordered combination of two small particles with facets through a common lattice plane, have been observed