Experimental Studies for Future LHC Beams in the SPS

The High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) project requires significantly higher beam intensity than presently accessible in the LHC injector chain. The aim of the LHC injectors upgrade project (LIU) is to prepare the CERN accelerators for the future needs of the LHC. Therefore a series of SPS machine studies with high brightness beams were performed, assessing the present performance reach and identifying remaining limitations. Of particular concern are beam loading and longitudinal instabilities at high energy, space charge for beams with 50 ns bunch spacing and electron cloud effects for beams with 25 ns bunch spacing. This paper provides a summary of the performed studies that have been possible thanks to the implementation of the SPS low gamma-transition optics.