Compensation of long-range beam-beam interaction at the CERN LHC

Charged particle beams in high energy, high luminosity particle colliders are accompanied by strong and highly nonlinear electromagnetic fields. When two counterrotating beams pass each other these fields give rise to so called ``beam-beam interactions'' with a wide spectrum of negative consequences for the beam dynamics resulting e.g. in particle loss and emittance blow up. In the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) such crossings will occur each turn four times ``head-on'' (once at each interaction point, IP) and fifteen times ``long-range'' on each side of each IP with a small transverse offset. In order to correct for the resulting perturbations a wire compensator is foreseen. In the framework of this thesis the tracking code ``BBTrack'' has been developed and employed to investigate long-range beam-beam interaction and its wire compensation in the CERN LHC (nominal and upgraded). Complementary experimental studies at RHIC at BNL and the CERN SPS were performed allowing experimental insight in the related loss mechanism and benchmarking of the simulation software. Technical implementations for a pulsed compensator have been studie