Testing long range beam-beam compensation for the LHC luminosity upgrade

The performance of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and its minimum crossing angle are limited by long-range beam-beam collisions. A wire compensators can mitigate part of the long-range effects and may allow for smaller crossing angles, or higher beam intensity. A prototype long-range wire compensator should be installed in the LHC by 2014/15. The originally reserved position for the wire compensator (named BBC) seems not available in this first step, we need so to test other possibilities. The performed tests consider various longitudinal and transverse locations, different wire shapes, different optics configuration and trying several crossing angles between the beam. Simulation are done with the weak-strong code BBtrack developed by U. Dorda. New postprocessing tools were used to analyse tune footprints and particle stability In particular for particle stability was implemented a new method for the Lyapunov coefficient calculation.