LHC Optics Determination with Proton Tracks Measured in the Roman Pot Detectors of the TOTEM Experiment

Abstract

The TOTEM experiment at the LHC is equipped with near beam movable devices -- called Roman Pots (RP) -- which detect protons scattered at the interaction point (IP5) arriving to the detectors through the magnet lattice of the LHC. Proton kinematics at IP5 is reconstructed from positions and angles measured by the RP detectors, on the basis of the transport matrix between IP5 and the RP locations. The precision of optics determination is therefore of the key importance for the experiment. TOTEM developed a novel method of machine optics determination making use of angle-position distributions of elastically scattered protons observed in the RP detectors together with the data retrieved from several machine databases. The method has been successfully applied to the data samples registered in 2010 and 2011. The studies show that the transport matrix could be estimated with a precision better than 1%.