Investigation of octupolar resonances in the LHC

During operation for luminosity production, the LHC runs with very strong Landau octupoles to ensure the collective stability of the beams. A disadvantage of this is that these octupoles can drive resonances which can be detrimental to beam lifetime. Recently, a special optics configuration has been utilised to reduce the impact of the main octupoles on lifetime. This design relies on correctly modelling the resonance driving term (RDT) response to changes in these magnetic circuits. This paper presents beam-based studies comparing the RDT response to simulations where large discrepancies were found. To try and understand the source of this, several approaches were taken. Various methods including individual circuit measurements, studies of other circuits, and tests at different energy were employed but it remained challenging to localise the source of the discrepancy around the ring. This paper presents an attempt to apply and extend a segment-by-segment method, that has been very effective at identifying local linear optics errors, to non-linear errors through analysis of RDTs.