Studies on stochastic cooling of heavy ions in the LHC

Future high luminosity heavy-ion operation of the LHC will be dominated by very rapid luminosity decay due to the large collision cross-section and, to a lesser extent, emittance growth from intra-beam scattering (IBS) due to the high bunch intensities. A stochastic cooling system could reduce the emittance far below its initial value and reduce the losses from debunching during collisions, allowing more of the initial beam intensity to be converted into integrated luminosity before the beams are dumped. We review the status of this proposal, system and hardware properties and potential locations for the equipment in the tunnel.