LHC Interaction Region Upgrade: Phase I

The LHC is starting operation with beam in 2008. The primary goal of CERN and the LHC community is to ensure that the collider is operated efficiently, maximizing its physics reach, and to achieve the nominal performance in the shortest term. Since several years the community has been discussing the directions for upgrading the experiments, in particular ATLAS and CMS, the LHC machine and the CERN proton injector complex. A well substantiated and coherent scenario for the first phase of the upgrade, which is foreseen in 2013, is now approved by CERN Council. In this paper, we present the goals and the proposed conceptual solution for the Phase-I upgrade of the LHC interaction regions. This phase relies on the mature Nb-Ti superconducting magnet technology, with the target of increasing the luminosity by a factor of 2-3 with respect to the nominal luminosity of 1034 cm-2s-1, while maximising the use of the existing infrastructure.