Observations of Instabilities in the LHC Due to Missing Head-On Beam-Beam Interactions

We report the observation of coherent instabilities on individual bunches out of the LHC bunch train. These instabilities occurred spontaneously after several hours of stable beam while in the other cases they were related to the application of a small transverse beam separation during a luminosity optimization. Only few bunches were affected, depending on their collision schemes and following various tests we interpret these instabilities as a sudden loss of Landau damping when the tune spread from the beam-beam interaction becomes insufficient.