BEAM QUALITY PRESERVATION IN THE CERN PS-SPS COMPLEX

The LHC will require beams of unprecedented transverse and longitudinal brightness. Their production imposes tight constraints on the emittance growth in each element of the LHC injector chain, namely the PS-SPS Accelerator Complex. The problems encountered at the different stages of the acceleration in the complex span a wide range of topics, such as injection matching, RF gymnastics, space charge, transverse and longitudinal single- and coupled-bunch instabilities, and electron cloud effects. The measurement techniques developed and applied to identify and study the various sources of emittance dilution to the high precision required for the LHC beams and the solutions found to control such phenomena are illustrated.