Colliding During the Squeeze and β* Levelling in the LHC

While significantly more complicated in term of operation, bringing the beams into collisions prior to the β squeeze rather than after presents some advantages. Indeed, the large tune spread arising from the non-linearity of head-on beam-beam interactions is profitable, as it can damp impedance driven instabilities much more efficiently than external non-linearity such as octupoles. Moreover, this operation allows to level the luminosity in the case when the peak luminosity is too high for the experiments. Operational issues are discussed and experimental results from the LHC are presented.