Very fast LHC Crab cavity failures and their mitigation

For the high-luminosity LHC upgrade program (HL-LHC), the installation of crab cavities (CCs) is needed to compensate the geometric luminosity loss due to the crossing angle and for luminosity leveling [1]. The baseline is a local scheme with CCs around the ATLAS and CMS experiments. In a failure case (e.g. a control failure or arcing in the coupler), the voltage and/or phase of a CC can change significantly with a very fast time constant of the order of 1 to 10 LHC turns. This can lead to large, global betatron oscillations of the beam. The impact of CC failures on the beam dynamics is discussed and the results of dedicated simulations are presented. Mitigation strategies to limit the impact of CC failures to an acceptable level are proposed.