Observations, Analysis and Mitigation of Recurrent LHC Beam Dumps Caused by Fast Losses in Arc Half-Cell 16L2

Abstract

Recurrent beam dumps significantly perturbed the operation of the CERN LHC in the summer months of 2017, especially in August. These unexpected beam dumps were triggered by fast beam losses that built up in the cryogenic beam vacuum at the half-cell 16 left of LHC-IP2 and were detected either at that location but mainly in the collimation insertions. This contribution details the experimental observables (beam losses, coherent instabilities, heat load to cryogenic system, vacuum signals), the extent of the understanding of the beam loss and instability mechanisms and the mitigation steps and new settings that allowed recovering the luminosity performance of the LHC for the rest of the Run