Assessment of the performance of High-Luminosity LHC operational scenarios: integrated luminosity and effective pile-up density

The High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) experiments will operate at unprecedented levels of event pile-up from proton–proton collisions at 14 TeV centre-of-mass energy. In this paper, we study the performance of the baseline and a series of alternative scenarios in terms of the delivered integrated luminosity and its quality (pile-up density). A new figure-of-merit is introduced, the effective pile-up density, a concept that reflects the expected detector efficiency in the reconstruction of event vertices for a given operational scenario, acting as a link between the machine and experimental sides. Alternative scenarios have been proposed either to improve the baseline performance or to provide operational schemes in the case of particular limitations. Simulations of the evolution of their optimum fills with the latest set of parameters of the HL-LHC are performed with $\beta^*$-levelling, and the results are discussed in terms of both the integrated luminosity and the effective pile-up density. The crab kissing scheme, a proposed scenario for pile-up density control, is re-evaluated under this new perspective with updated beam and optics parameters. Estimates on the expected integrated luminosity due to the impact of crab cavity noise, full crab crossing, and reduced cross section for burn-off, are also presented.