The lattice of the CERN Large Hadron Collider

The lattice of the CERN Large Hadron Collider is designed with 23 regular cells per are, each containing 6 tightly packed 14.2 m long dipoles. This allows to reach 7 TeV per beam with a dipole field of 8.4 Tesla. There are four experimental insertions, two of which are devoted to high luminosity experiments with /spl plusmn/23 m of free space for the detector. The other two experimental insertions are combined with injection. The value of /spl beta/* at the interaction points is tunable from 6 m at injection to 0.5 m in collision. The energy deposition in the inner triplets is carefully reduced to sustain the nominal luminosity of 10/sup 34/ cm/sup -2/ s/sup -1/. Two insertions are devoted to collect the halo particles with large emittance and momentum spread surrounding the beam core: escaping rates of the protons are estimated to be less than 4/spl middot/10/sup 6/ sec/sup -1/ m/sup -1/. Finally, one insertion is used to extract the particles in the vertical direction with a minimized deflecting strength.