Simulating the Wire Compensation of LHC Long-Range Beam-beam Effects.

The performance of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its minimum crossing angle are limited by long-range beam-beam collisions. Wire compensators can mitigate part of the long-range effects. We perform simulations to explore the efficiency of the compensation at possible wire locations by examining the tune footprint and the dynamic aperture. Starting from the weak-strong simulation code BBTrack we developed a new Lyapunov calculation tool, which seems to better diagnose regular or chaotic particle behavior. We also developed faster ways to execute the simulation and the post-processing. These modifications have allowed us to study different wire positions (longitudinal and transverse), varying wire currents, several wire shapes, and a range of beam-beam crossing angles, in view of a prototype wire installation in the LHC foreseen for 2014/15. Our simulations demonstrate that the wire can provide a good compensation, including for reduced crossing angle. Among the benefits of an LHC wire compensator are a better overlap of colliding bunches, as well as the possibility of smaller β* or higher beam current.