MD 2197: Experimental studies of Landau damping by means of Beam Transfer Function measurements in the presence of beam-beam interactions and diffusive mechanisms

Beam Transfer Function (BTF) measurements are direct measurement of the stability diagrams that define the stability threshold of coherent beam instabilities driven by the impedance. At the LHC, some coherent instabilities at flat top energy are still not fully understood and the BTF measurements provide a method to experimentally probe the Landau damping of the proton beams. The BTF response is sensitive to the particle distribution changes and contain information about the transverse tune spread in the beams. The BTF system has been installed in the LHC in the 2015 in order to investigate the Landau damping at different stages of the operational cycle, machine configurations (different octupole currents, crossing angles, tunes etc...) and in presence of beam-beam excited resonances that may provoke diffusion mechanisms with a consequence change of Landau damping. Past MDs showed some difficulties for the reconstruction of the stability diagram from BTF measurements and several improvements on the BTF system have been put in place in order to improve the signal to noise ratio. In this note a detailed procedure of the MD is described together with some preliminary results of BTF measurements in the presence of linear coupling