MD 2722: Investigation of Landau damping by means of BTF measurements

Stability diagrams quantify the LHC stability thresholds due to the beam coupling impedance. Beam Transfer Function (BTF) measurements are a direct measurements of the stability diagram and therefore of the Landau damping of proton beams. Some coherent instabilities at the LHC are still not fully understood, especially when in the presence of beam-beam long range interactions at the end of the betatron squeeze. The beam-beam excited resonances can cause diffusive mechanisms and particle distribution changes that can lead to a different stability w.r.t. expectations for a Gaussian particle distribution. To investigate limitations of the models, a BTF system has been installed in the LHC in the 2015 in order to measure the Landau damping. During past MDs several configurations have been investigated: tune shifts and tune spread of the beams have been measured as a function of the octupole currents, tunes and beam-beam long range interactions. Some measurements artifacts were observed and mitigated, however the signal quality remains too low to allow for an accurate reconstruction of the stability diagram. Improvements on the reconstruction of the stability diagram from BTF measurements will be shown in this note together with results of BTF measurements for different octupole current at injection energy.