LHC Beam Stability and Feedback Control - Orbit and Energy -

This report presents the stability and control of the Large Hadron Collider's (LHC) two beam orbits and their particle momenta using beam-based feedback systems. The LHC, presently being built at CERN, will store, accelerate and provide particle collisions with a maximum particle momentum of 7TeV/c and a nominal luminosity of L = 10^34 cm^−2s^−1. The presence of two beams, with both high intensity as well as high particle energies, requires excellent control of particle losses inside a superconducting environment, which will be provided by the LHC Cleaning and Machine Protection System. The performance and function of this and other systems depends critically on the stability of the beam and may eventually limit the LHC performance. Environmental and accelerator-inherent sources as well as failure of magnets and their power converters may perturb and reduce beam stability and may consequently lead to an increase of particle loss inside the cryogenic mass. In order to counteract these disturbances, control of the key beam parameters – orbit, tune, energy, coupling and chromaticity – will be an integral part of LHC operation. Since manual correction of these parameters may reach its limit with respect to required precision and expected time-scales, the LHC is the first proton collider that requires automatic feedback control systems for safe and reliable machine operation. The aim of this report is to help and contribute towards these efforts.