Studies of Longitudinal Beam Losses at LHC Injection

Due to higher beam intensities, the required rf power in the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) era is expected to be at the limit of the available rf power. To mitigate potential limitations of the rf system, the injection voltage can be reduced at the expense of beam losses. In this paper, the average and bunch-by-bunch losses are estimated from Run 2 beam intensity measurements in the SPS before extraction and in the LHC after injection. Macro-particle simulations are performed with CERN’s Beam Longitudinal Dynamics code to reproduce the observed SPS-to-LHC capture and LHC flat-bottom losses. First estimates of injection losses for the HL-LHC at different injection voltages and injection energy errors are discussed.