Studies on heavy ion losses from collimation cleaning at the LHC

The LHC collimation system protects superconducting magnets from beam losses. By design, it was optimized for the high-intensity proton challenges but so far provided adequate protection also during the LHC heavy-ion runs with 208Pb82+ ions up to a beam energy of 4 Z TeV. Ion beam cleaning brings specific challenges due to different physical interactions with the collimator materials and might require further improvements for operation at 7 Z TeV. In this article, we study heavy-ion beam losses leaking out of the LHC collimation system, both in measurement and simulations. The simulations are carried out using both ICOSIM, with a simplified ion physics model implemented, and SixTrack, including more detailed starting conditions from FLUKA but without including online scattering in subsequent collimator hits. The results agree well with measurements overall, although some discrepancies are present. The reasons for the discrepancies are investigated and, on this basis, the requirements for an improved simulation tool are outlined.