Charting the Luminosity Capabilities of the CERN Large Hadron Collider with Various Nuclear Species

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the potential for increasing the LHC's ion collision luminosity by exploring different nuclear species and beam schemes, aiming to enhance future experimental capabilities in high energy physics.

Contribution

It provides projections of nucleon-nucleon luminosity for various ion species and investigates alternative beam production methods to improve collider performance.

Findings

Potential fourfold increase in luminosity with alternative species and schemes.

Optimistic scenarios suggest significant improvements for future runs.

Outlines a plan for experimental validation and refinement of projections.

Abstract

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has been instrumental in recent advances in experimental high energy physics by colliding beams of protons and heavier nuclei at unprecedented energies. The present heavy-ion programme is based mainly on colliding lead nuclei. For future ion runs, there is strong interest to achieve a significantly higher integrated nucleon-nucleon luminosity, which might be achieved through collisions of species other than Pb. In this paper, we explore the nucleon-nucleon luminosity projections in the LHC for a selection of ion species ranging from He to Xe, and including Pb as reference. Alternative beam production schemes are investigated as a way to mitigate effects such as space charge that degrade the beam quality in the LHC injectors. In the most optimistic scenarios, we find up to about a factor~4 improvement in integrated nucleon-nucleon luminosity for a typical future one-month run, with respect to the present Pb programme. We also outline a future study programme and experiments to test the assumptions and refine the simulated projections put forward in this article.