Plans for the future of proton accelerators at CERN

The Large Hadron Collider, presently in construction at CERN, will be filled through a set of high performance proton accelerators providing the high brightness beam needed to reach the foreseen luminosity. Although this difficult project has top priority and uses most of the CERN resources, it is nevertheless time investigating improvements of the proton accelerator complex for physical cases beyond the LHC expectations. The needs of multiple physics communities have to be taken into account, as well as the necessity of consolidating the installations while keeping high reliability. This paper starts from the analysis and proposals made by the “High Intensity Proton” (HIP) working group [http://ab-div.web.cern.ch/ab-div/Projects/hip/, M. Benedikt, K. Cornelis, R. Garoby, E. Metral, F. Ruggiero, M. Vretenar, “Report of the High Intensity Protons Working Group”, CERN-AB-2004-022 OP/RF] to improve the performances of the PS and the SPS complex and better match the users requests in a staged scenario at short and medium term, and complement it, addressing the main possibilities beyond that horizon.