Analysis on bunch-by-bunch beam losses at 6.5 TeV in the Large Hadron Collider

In 2018, a large fraction of the physics data taking at the Large Hadron Collider has been performed with a beam energy of 6.5 TeV, the nominal bunch spacing of 25 ns and beta functions at the high luminosity interaction points of 30 cm. In order to maximize the integrated luminosity, the crossing angles are gradually reduced as the beam intensity reduces due to luminosity burn-off. In these conditions the beam lifetime is visibly affected by collective effects and in particular by beam-beam interaction and electron cloud effects. By analysing the beam losses at a bunch-by-bunch level, it is possible to disentangle the contributions from different effects and to assess the impact on the losses of changes applied to the machine configuration.