Modelling and Measurements of Bunch Profiles at the LHC Flat Bottom

At the LHC flat bottom the interplay between a series of effects (i.e. intrabeam scattering, longitudinal beam manipulations, non-linearities of the machine, etc) can lead to a population of the tails of the beam distributions, which may become non-Gaussian. This paper presents observations of the evolution of particle distributions in the LHC flat bottom. Novel distribution functions are employed to represent the beam profiles, and used as a guideline for generalising emittance growth rate estimations due to IBS. Finally, an attempt is made to benchmark an IBS Monte-Carlo simulation code, able to track 3D particle distributions, with the measured beam profile evolutions.