Crystal collimation of heavy-ion beams at the Large Hadron Collider

An important upgrade has been deployed for the collimation system of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for lead-ion beams that are already planned to reach their high-luminosity target intensity upgrade in the ongoing LHC Run 3 (2022–2026). While certain effects like e-cloud, beam-beam, impedance, injection, and dump protection are relaxed with ion beams, halo collimation becomes an increasing challenge, as the conventional multistage collimation system is about two orders of magnitude less efficient than that for proton beams. Ion fragments scattered out of the collimators in the betatron cleaning insertion risk quenching the cold dipole magnets downstream and may represent performance limitations. Planar channeling in bent crystals has been proven effective for high-energy heavy ions. A crystal collimation system was integrated into the LHC as a baseline solution for collimation in the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) era. In this paper, simulation and measurement results demonstrating the observation of channeling of heavy-ion beams and improvement in collimation cleaning in the multi-TeV energy regime are presented. The efficiency of the collimation scheme foreseen for the HL-LHC is presented. The highlights of the collimation performance in 2023, when crystal collimation was successfully deployed operationally for the first time, are also presented.

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Publication Details

Journal
Physical Review Accelerators and Beams
Published
2025-05-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevaccelbeams.28.051001
Primary Topic
Crystallography and Radiation Phenomena
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

Crystal collimation of heavy-ion beams at the Large Hadron Collider

Anton Lechner, V. Guidi, Yu.A. Gavrikov, R. Seidenbinder et al.
Physical Review Accelerators and Beams
Crystallography and Radiation Phenomena
article

Crystal collimation of heavy-ion beams at the Large Hadron Collider

Anton Lechner, V. Guidi, Yu.A. Gavrikov, R. Seidenbinder, M. Calviani, Björn Hans Filip Lindström, A. Abramov, Pascal Hermes, Quentin Demassieux, O. Aberle, Kay Dewhurst, Luigi Salvatore Esposito, Y. Ivanov, A. Mazzolari, Gianmarco Ricci, Daniele Mirarchi, Mario Di Castro, M. Tamisari, Roderik Bruce, A. Masi, L. Bandiera, S. Redaelli, Eloise Matheson, J. B. Potoine, M. Romagnoni, Rongrong Cai, M. D’Andrea, Volodymyr Rodin, S. Paiva, S. Gilardoni
article en

Abstract

An important upgrade has been deployed for the collimation system of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for lead-ion beams that are already planned to reach their high-luminosity target intensity upgrade in the ongoing LHC Run 3 (2022–2026). While certain effects like e-cloud, beam-beam, impedance, injection, and dump protection are relaxed with ion beams, halo collimation becomes an increasing challenge, as the conventional multistage collimation system is about two orders of magnitude less efficient than that for proton beams. Ion fragments scattered out of the collimators in the betatron cleaning insertion risk quenching the cold dipole magnets downstream and may represent performance limitations. Planar channeling in bent crystals has been proven effective for high-energy heavy ions. A crystal collimation system was integrated into the LHC as a baseline solution for collimation in the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) era. In this paper, simulation and measurement results demonstrating the observation of channeling of heavy-ion beams and improvement in collimation cleaning in the multi-TeV energy regime are presented. The efficiency of the collimation scheme foreseen for the HL-LHC is presented. The highlights of the collimation performance in 2023, when crystal collimation was successfully deployed operationally for the first time, are also presented.

Physical Review Accelerators and BeamsVol. 28(5)
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (IT), Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Ferrara (IT), École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (CH), European Organization for Nuclear Research (CH)
CERN
Openalex Percentile: Top 95%
Crystallography and Radiation Phenomena
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