A Local Modification of HL-LHC Optics for Improved Performance of the Alice Fixed-Target Layout

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator colliding beams of protons and lead ions at energies up to 7 TeV and 2.76 TeV, respectively. ALICE is one of the detector experiments optimised for heavy-ion collisions. A fixed-target experiment in ALICE is considered to collide a portion of the beam halo, split using a bent crystal, with an internal target placed a few meters upstream of the detector. Fixed-target collisions offer many physics opportunities related to hadronic matter and the quark-gluon plasma to extend the research potential of the CERN accelerator complex. Production of physics events depends on the particle flux on target. The machine layout for the fixed-target experiment is being developed to provide a flux of particles on a target high enough to exploit the full capabilities of the ALICE detector acquisition system. In this paper, we discuss a method of increasing the system’s performance by applying a local modification of optics to set the crystal at the optimal betatron phase.