Collimation of heavy-ion beams in the HE-LHC

Abstract

A design study for a future collider to be built in the LHC tunnel, the High-Energy Large Hadron Collider (HE-LHC), has been launched as part of the Future Circular Collider (FCC) study at CERN. It would provide proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 27 TeV as well as collisions of heavy ions at the equivalent magnetic rigidity. HE-LHC is being designed under the stringent constraint of using the existing tunnel and therefore the resulting lattice and optics differ in layout and phase advance from the LHC. It is necessary to evaluate the performance of the collimation system for ion beams in HE-LHC in addition to proton beams. In the case of ion beams, the fragmentation and electromagnetic dissociation that relativistic heavy ions can undergo in collimators, as well as the unprecedented energy per nucleon of the HE-LHC, requires dedicated simulations. Results from a study of collimation efficiency for the nominal lead ion (208Pb82+) beams performed with the SixTrack-FLUKA coupling framework are presented. These include loss maps with comparison against an estimated quench limit as well as detailed considerations of loss spikes in the superconducting aperture for critical sections of the machine such as the dispersion suppressors.