Beam Stability of the LHC Beam Transfer Line TI8

Injection of beam into the LHC at 450 GeV/c proceeds over two 2.7 km long transfer lines from the SPS. The small aperture of the LHC at injection imposes tight constraints on the stability of the beam transfer. The first transfer line TI 8 was commissioned in the fall of 2004 with low intensity beam. Since the beam position monitor signal fluctuations were dominated by noise with low intensity beam, the beam stability could not be obtained from a simple comparison of consecutive trajectories. Instead model independent analysis (MIA) techniques as well as scraping on collimators were used to estimate the intrinsic stability of the transfer line. This paper presents the analysis methods and the resulting stability estimates.