Study of off-momentum losses at the start of the ramp in the Large Hadron Collider

At the start of the energy ramp at the LHC, any uncaptured beam is quickly lost on the momentum collimators. This causes significant instantaneous losses, and it is therefore important to understand these losses in detail in case they would become critical at the LHC itself or in future machines. This note aims at first analyzing data of these losses from the 2016 LHC run to quantify their features. Then, simulation methods are developed. First a simple but fast one-turn map model is used to study the phase space motion and the expected time profile of losses, after which SixTrack is used to provide a more complete simulation environment including all machine elements together with scattering in the collimators. A combined simulation, where first the Toy model is used to track particles for the first 11 s of the ramp, before they are handed over to SixTrack, is shown to be reasonably fast and to produce loss maps that qualitatively agree with the measurements. The time profile of the measured losses is used to make an estimate of the starting distribution of the uncaptured beam outside the bucket, however the real distribution is not well known. Several different distributions are studied which all produce similar results, which gives confidence in the analysis.