In view of High Luminosity (HL) - Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project, an upgraded collimation system has been developed to accommodate a rise of ten times of the integrated luminosity compared to the LHC. A new series of collimators will be produced and installed in the machine during the Long Shutdown 3 (LS3) to take place during 2026-2028. The updated design incorporates cutting-edge technologies to meet the demanding operating requirements. Multiple production activities are recognized as critical to ensure the quality of the collimators. Comprehensive qualification checks of the production procedures are planned, and functional tests will be conducted to validate the performance of each unit produced.

Bent crystals are a mature technology used in several applications at CERN, such as the crystal-assisted collimation system for LHC ion operation and reduction of losses during the slow extraction from the SPS by shadowing the electrostatic septum. In the future, it is planned to measure electric and magnetic dipole moments of short-lived particles with a double-crystal experiment in the LHC. To consolidate their strategic use, CERN has been equipped to produce in-house bent crystals. Each crystal is required to be fully validated before its installation by different techniques, such as metrology, X-ray diffractometry and characterization with beams. The latter can measure the bending angle, the torsion, and the channeling efficiency, which is related to crystal imperfections. In this contribution, we present the performance with beams of the first prototype bent crystals manufactured at CERN and tested during a measurement campaign in the North Area.

An important upgrade programme is planned for the collimation system of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for lead–ion beams that will already reach their high-luminosity target intensity upgrade in the LHC Run 3 (2022-2025). While certain effects like e-cloud, beam-beam, impedance, inject and dump protection are relaxed with ion beams, halo collimation becomes a challenge, as the conventional multi-stage collimation system is about two orders of magnitude less efficient than for proton beams. Ion fragments scattered out of the collimators in the betatron cleaning insertion risk to quench cold dipole magnets downstream and may represent performance limitations. Planar channeling in bent crystals has been proven effective for high energy heavy ions and is now considered as baseline solution for collimation at High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). In this paper, simulation and measurement results, demonstrating the observation of channeling of heavy-ion beams and improvement of collimation cleaning in the multi-TeV energy regime, and the efficiency of the collimation scheme foreseen for HL-LHC are presented.