Transverse beam instabilities in the presence of linear coupling in the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

In the past, transverse coherent instabilities have been observed at the Hadron-Electron Ring Accelerator (HERA) proton ring that were instigated by the presence of linear coupling. Linear coupling can also potentially explain some transverse instabilities that were observed in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in both run I and run II, however a detailed description of the destabilizing mechanism of linear coupling was not known at the time. A study into the effect of linear coupling on transverse beam stability was carried out, and a new mechanism that could incite transverse instabilities by causing a loss of Landau damping has been found. The study includes time domain simulations with PyHEADTAIL and frequency domain computations based on analytical approaches, and was then verified by measurements with a single proton bunch in the LHC.