Controlled Transverse Blow-up of Highenergy Proton Beams for Aperture Measurements and Loss Maps

A technique was developed to blow-up transversely in a controlled way high energy proton beams in the LHC. The technique is based on band limited white noise excitation that is injected into the transverse damper feedback loop. The injected signal can be gated to selectively blow-up individual trains of bunches. The speed of transverse blow-up can be precisely controlled. This opens the possibility to perform safely and efficiently aperture measurements and loss maps with high intensity bunch trains well above stored beam energies that are considered to be safe. In particular, lengthy procedures for measurements at top energy, otherwise requiring multiple fills of individual bunches, can be avoided. In this paper, the method is presented and results from beam measurements are discussed and compared with alternative blowup methods.