Commissioning 2015

Initial commissioning is the first stage of the overall strategy for the year.

The initial commissioning phase should evolve through:

commissioning of the nominal cycle
system commissioning of beam related systems at the various phases of the cycle;
standard measurement and correction;
set-up of protection devices;
and validation of the set-up.

It is a relatively complex phase with necessary interplay between the various teams to allow beam-based commissioning of systems such as tune and orbit feedbacks, transverse dampers, RF etc. under appropriate conditions at the various phases of the operational cycle. It is an iterative process - each phase is necessarily visited several times

The aims of this initial commissioning phase are as follows.

Establish nominal cycle with a robust set of operating parameters. This will include commissioning of the squeeze to an appropriate β* with measurement and correction of the optics and key beam parameters at each stage. One should not expect to probe the limits of the LHC parameter space at this stage.
Measure and correct the optics. Measure the aperture.
Set-up injection, beam dump, collimation and validate set-up with beam.
Commission beam based systems: transverse feedback, RF, injection, beam dump systems, beam instrumentation, orbit and tune feedbacks.
Commission and test machine protection backbone with beam.
Check the understanding of: magnet model; higher order optics.

The initial commissioning phase is performed with low intensity, low number of bunches, and generally safe beam. The output of this phase is taken to be first collisions in Stable Beams with a small number of bunches.