Simulations of heavy-ion halo collimation at the CERN Large Hadron Collider: Benchmark with measurements and cleaning performance evaluation

Protons and heavy-ion beams at unprecedented energies are brought into collisions in the CERN Large Hadron Collider for high-energy experiments. The LHC multi-stage collimation system is designed to provide protection against regular and abnormal losses in order to reduce the risk of quenches of the superconducting magnets as well as keeping background in the experiments under control. Compared to protons, beam collimation in the heavy-ion runs is more challenging despite the lower stored beam energies, because the efficiency of cleaning with heavy ions has been observed to be two orders of magnitude worse. This is due to the differences in the interaction mechanisms between the beams and the collimators. Ion beams experience fragmentation and electromagnetic dissociation at the collimators that result in a substantial flux of off-rigidity particles that escape the collimation system. These out-scattered nuclei might be lost around the ring, eventually imposing a limit on the maximum achievable stored beam energy. Accurate simulation tools are crucial in order to understand and control these losses. A new simulation framework has been developed for heavy-ion collimation based on the coupling of the Sixtrack tracking code and the FLUKA Monte Carlo code that models the electromagnetic and nuclear interactions of the heavy-ions with the nuclei of the collimator material. In this paper, the new simulation tool is described. Furthermore, Sixtrack-FLUKA coupling simulations are presented and compared with measurements done with Pb ions in the LHC. The agreement between simulations and measurements is discussed and the results are used to understand and optimise losses. The simulation tool is also applied to predict the performance of the collimation system for the High-Luminosity LHC.