Updated Simulation Studies of Damage Limit of Lhc Tertiary Collimators

The tertiary collimators (TCTs) in the LHC, installed in front of the experiments, in standard operation intercept fractions of 10 halo particles. However, they risk to be hit by high-intensity primary beams in case of asynchronous beam dump. TCT damage thresholds were initially inferred from results of destructive tests on a TCT jaw, supported by numerical simulations, assuming simplified impact scenarios with one single bunch hitting the jaw with a given impact parameter. In this paper, more realistic failure conditions, including a train of bunches and taking into account the full collimation hierarchy, are used to derive updated damage limits. The results are used to update the margins in the collimation hierarchy and could thus potentially have an influence on the LHC performance.