C E Hill

Recent lead ion storage tests on LEAR

With the completion of the antiproton physics program, the Low Energy Antiproton Ring is now available to be used as an accumulator ring for heavy ions in the LBC injector chain. The proposed scheme for the injection of Pb ions is given, where an intensity gain of 125 is obtained by accumulating Pb ions with electron cooling in the LEAR ring. With a linac cycling at 10 Hz and cooling times faster than 100 ms, 20 pulses can be accumulated in 2 s before transfer to the PS, the next machine in the chain. A number of machine experiments have been performed and will continue this year, in order to establish the techniques required. We discuss injection line tests, ion beam lifetime and vacuum measurements and cooling time measurements.

Ions for LHC: Beam Physics and Engineering Challenges

The first phase of the heavy ion physics program at the LHC aims to provide lead-lead collisions at energies of 5.5 TeV per colliding nucleon pair and ion-ion luminosity of 1027cm-2s-1. The transformation of CERN’s ion injector complex (Linac3-LEIR-PS-SPS) presents a number of beam physics and engineering challenges, which are described in this paper. In the LHC itself, there are fundamental performance limitations due to various beam loss mechanisms. To study these without risk of damage there will be an initial period of operation with a reduced number of nominal intensity bunches. While reducing the work required to commission the LHC with ions in 2008, this will still enable early physics discoveries.