Beam dynamics aspects of crab cavities in the CERN Large Hadron Collider

Modern colliders bring into collision a large number of bunches 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 (CC) can be used to restore effective head-on collisions and thereby to increase the geometric luminosity. Such 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 Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may not only raise the luminosity, but it could also complicate the beam dynamics, e. g., crab cavities might not only cancel synchrobetatron 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 influence the aperture and orbit, also degrade the collimation cleaning efficiency, and so on. In this paper, we explore the principal feasibility of LHC crab cavities from a beam dynamics point of view. The implications of the crab cavities for the LHC optics, analytical and numerical luminosity studies, dynamic aperture, aperture and beta beating, emittance growth, beam-beam tune shift, long-range collisions, and synchrobetatron resonances, crab dispersion, and collimation efficiency will be discussed.