Correction of vertical crossing induced dispersion in LHC

Beam crossing schemes in the LHC interaction regions impose non-zero vertical closed orbit in the low-β triplets, which excite a perturbative periodic dispersion; the phenomenon is described and quantified in detail. It is shown that this dispersion reaches values at the limit of tolerances in the nominal optics of Version 5.0 of the LHC ring, and prohibitively large values in particular in the low-β quadrupoles and interaction regions in the foreseen extreme β-squeeze case (β* = 0.25 m). Such behavior justifies including a local correction in the LHC design, in order to damp the effect and confine it has such as possible in the vicinity of the excitation sources (the low-β triplets). An optical compensation scheme based on the use of skew quadrupoles is described in detail, as well as entailed residual dispersion. (author)