Abstract:

"The High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) presents significant collimation challenges due to its high stored beam energy. An effective collimation system is essential for ensuring stable operation, protecting superconducting magnets, and minimizing background to the experiments. At the same time, the tight collimator gaps required for beam cleaning make the collimation system a major contributor to the overall HL-LHC impedance budget.

To address these challenges, new optics configurations for the collimation insertions have been developed, increasing the beta function at the collimators and enhancing the single-pass dispersion. These changes improve cleaning performance—reducing the risk of magnet quenches—and help lower the collimation impedance.

This talk will present both simulation and experimental results from these studies, and discuss the prospects for future operational deployment. The new optics have already been included in the HL-LHC proton baseline, marking the first change to the betatron collimation optics since LHC commissioning in 2008."