Performance Studies for Protection Against Asynchronous Dumps in the LHC

The LHC beam dump system has to safely dispose all beams in a wide energy range of 450 GeV to 7 TeV. A 3 ms abort gap in the beam structure for the switch-on of the extraction kicker field ideally allows a loss-free extraction under normal operating conditions. However, a low number of asynchronous beam aborts is to be expected from reliability calculations and from the first year's operational experience with the beam dump kickers. For such cases, MAD-X simulations including all optics and alignment errors have been performed to determine loss patterns around the LHC as a function of the position of the main protection elements in interaction region six. Special attention was paid to the beam load on the tungsten collimators which protect the triplets in the LHC experimental insertions, and the tracking results compared with semi-analytical numerical estimates. The simulations are also compared to the results of beam commissioning of these protection devices.