Crab-cavity Beam Dynamics Issues for an Lhc Upgrade

Modern colliders bring into collision a large number of bunches per pulse or per turn to achieve a high luminosity. The long-range beam-beam effects arising from parasitic encounters at such colliders are mitigated by introducing a crossing angle. Under these conditions, crab cavities can be used to restore effective head-on collisions and thereby to increase the geometric luminosity. Crab cavities have been proposed for both linear and circular colliders. The crab cavities are rf cavities operated in a transverse dipole mode, which imparts on the beam particles a transverse kick that varies with the longitudinal position along the bunch. The use of crab cavities in the LHC may not only raise the luminosity, but it could also complicate the beam dynamics, e.g. crab cavities might not only cancel synchro-betatron resonances excited by the crossing angle but they could also excite new ones, they could reduce the dynamic aperture for off-momentum particles, they could degrade the collimation cleaning efficiency, and so on. In this note, we summarize the results of several preliminary studies of beam-dynamics challenges associated with crab cavities in the LHC.