Status of Crystal Collimation Studies at the LHC

Crystal collimation is a technique that relies on highly pure bent crystals to coherently deflect beam particles - through the channeling mechanisms - onto dedicated absorbers. Standard multi-stage collimation systems for hadron beams use amorphous materials as primary collimators and might be limited by nuclear interactions and ion fragmentation that are strongly suppressed in crystals. A crystal collimation setup was installed in the betatron cleaning insertion of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to demonstrate with LHC beams the feasibility of this concept and to compare its performance with that of the present system. Channeling was observed for the first time with 6.5 TeV beam and and plans for further crystal collimation beam tests at the LHC are discussed. Results of these first beam tests are presented.