Phased approach to the LHC Insertion Upgrade and Magnet Challenges

The LHC is on its way for operation with beam in 2008. The first goal of CERN and the LHC community is to ensure that the collider is operated efficiently, gradually reaching its maximal performance. In parallel, discussions have started and there is already a wealth of ideas on the possible directions for upgrading the LHC insertions. In this talk, we illustrate some of the constraints limiting the upgrade scenarios, and argue that a phased approach with several intermediate targets is necessary. In the first phase, the known bottleneck in the low-β triplets needs to be removed in the perspective of the physics run of 2013. This phase relies on the mature Nb-Ti superconducting magnet technology, where improvements for a small scale production are still possible.