LHC Collimation: Design and Results from Prototyping and Beam Tests

The problem of collimation and beam cleaning is one of the most challenging aspects of the LHC project. A collimation system must be designed, built, installed and commissioned with parameters that extend the present state-of-the-art by 2-3 orders of magnitude. Problems include robustness, cleaning efficiency, impedance and operational aspects. A strong design effort has been performed at CERN over the last two years. The adopted phased approach is described. Robust and precisely controllable collimators have been designed. Several LHC prototype collimators have been built and tested with the highest beam intensities that are presently available at CERN. The successful beam tests are presented, including beam-based setup procedures, a 2 MJ robustness test and measurements of the collimator-induced impedance. Finally, an outlook is presented on the challenges that are ahead in the coming years.