HL-LHC: Integrated Luminosity and Availability

The objective of LHC operation is to optimise the output for particle physics by maximising the integrated luminosity. An important constraint comes from the event pile–up for one bunch crossing that should not exceed 140 per bunch crossing. With bunches every 25 ns the luminosity for data taking of the experiments should therefore not exceed 5*10^34 s-1cm-2. For the optimisation of the integrated luminosity it is planned to design HL-LHC for much higher luminosity than acceptable for the experiments and to limit the initial luminosity by operating with larger beam size at the collision points. During the fill, the beam size will be slowly reduced to keep the luminosity constant (as already done in LHCb). The gain from luminosity levelling depends on the average length of the fills. Today, with the LHC operating at 4 TeV, most fills are terminated due to equipment failures, resulting in an average fill length of about 5 h. In this paper we discuss the expected integrated luminosity for HL-LHC as a function of fill length and time between fills, depending on the expected Mean Time Between Failures of the LHC systems with HL-LHC parameters. We derive an availability target for HL-LHC and discuss steps to achieve this.