The LHC as a Nucleus-Nucleus Collider

Abstract

This paper begins with a summary of the status of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, including the lead-ion injector chain and the plans for the first phases of commissioning and operation with colliding proton beams. In a later phase, the LHC will collide lead nuclei at centre-of-mass energies of 5.5 TeV per colliding nucleon pair. This leap to 28 times beyond what is presently accessible will open up a new regime, not only in the experimental study of nuclear matter, but also in the beam physics of hadron colliders. Ultraperipheral and hadronic interactions of highly-charged beam nuclei will cause beam losses that dominate the luminosity decay and may quench superconducting magnets, setting upper limits on luminosity and stored beam current. Lower limits are set by beam instrumentation. On the other hand, coherent radiation by the nuclear charges should provide natural cooling to overcome intra-beam scattering. As with protons, a flexible, staged approach to full performance will test the limits and make optimal use of scheduled beam time.

Invited Paper at Quark Matter 2008, 20th International Conference on Ultra-Relativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions, Jaipur, India - 4-10 February 2008; Submitted to Journal of Physics G, Nuclear Physics; 10 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Electron-Positron Pair Production in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions
• First observations of beam losses due to bound-free pair production in a heavy-ion collider

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• Measurements of heavy ion beam losses from collimation
• Production and hadronic decays of Higgs bosons in heavy ion collisions
• Facilities for the Energy Frontier of Nuclear Physics
• Planck scale black holes - Theory vs. observations
• Gluino production in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions and nuclear shadowing