LHCb: Beam-gas background for LHCb at 3.5 TeV

We consider the machine induced backgrounds for LHCb arising from collisions of the beam with residual gas in the long straight sections of the LHC close to the experiment. We concentrate on the background particle fluxes initiated by inelastic beam-gas interactions with a direct line of sight to the experiment, with the potential impact on the experiment increasing for larger beam currents and changing gas pressures. In this paper we calculate the background rates for parameters foreseen with LHC running in 2011, using realistic residual pressure profiles. We also discuss the effect of using a pressure profile formulated in terms of equivalent hydrogen, through weighting of other residual gases by their cross section, upon the radial fluxes from the machine and the detector response. We present the expected rates and the error introduced through this approximation.