Instability latency in the LHC

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has experienced multiple instabilities that occur between minutes and hours after the last modification of the machine settings. The existence of instabilities with high latency has been reproduced also in simulations. Dedicated experiments, injecting a controlled noise into the beam, have now been performed to discover the dependence of this latency on key parameters. The results seem compatible with a mechanism linked to a steady and slow modification of the transverse beam distribution leading to a loss of Landau damping.