Simulation tools for heavy-ion tracking and collimation

Abstract

The LHC collimation system, which protects the LHC hardware from undesired beam loss, is less efficient with heavy-ion beams than with proton beams due to fragmentation into other nuclides inside the LHC collimators. Reliable simulation tools are required to estimate critical losses of particles scattered out of the collimation system which may quench the superconducting LHC magnets. Tracking simulations need to take into account the mass and charge of the tracked ions. Heavy-ions can be tracked as protons with ion-equivalent rigidity using proton tracking tools like SixTrack, as used in the simulation tool STIER. Alternatively, new tracking maps can be derived from a generalized accelerator Hamiltonian and implemented in SixTrack. This approach is used in the new tool heavy-ion SixTrack. When coupled to particle-matter interaction tools, they can be used to simulate the collimation efficiency with heavy-ion beams. Both simulation tools are presented and compared to measurements.