• M. Meddahi, S. Bart Pedersen, A. Boccardi, A.C. Butterworth, B. Goddard, G.H. Hemelsoet, W. Höfle, D. Jacquet, M. Jaussi, V. Kain, T. Lefèvre, E.N. Shaposhnikova, J.A. Uythoven, D. Valuch
  CERN, Geneva
• A.S. Fisher
  SLAC, Menlo Park, California
• E. Gianfelice-Wendt
  Fermilab, Batavia

Unbunched beam is a potentially serious issue in the LHC as it may quench the superconducting magnets during a beam abort. Unbunched particles, either not captured by the RF system at injection or leaking out of the RF bucket, will be removed by using the existing damper kickers to excite resonantly the particles in the abort gap. Following beam simulations, a strategy for cleaning the abort gap at different energies was proposed. The plans for the commissioning of the beam abort gap cleaning are described, and the first results from the beam commissioning are presented.