Summary of Beam Vacuum Activities Held during the LHC 2008-2009 Shutdown

At the start of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) 2008-2009 shutdown, all the LHC experimental vacuum chambers were vented to neon atmosphere. They were later pumped down shortly before beam circulation. Meanwhile, 2.3 km of vacuum beam pipes with NEG coatings were vented to air to allow the installation or repair of several components such as roman pot, magnets kicker, collimators, rupture disks and masks and reactivated thereafter. Beside these standard operations, “fast exchanges” of vacuum components and endoscopies inside cryogenic beam vacuum chambers were performed. This paper presents a summary of all the beam vacuum activities held during this period and the achieved vacuum performances