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Last LHC Superconducting Main
Magnet Completes the Suite at CERN
Geneva, Switzerland, November 28:
CERN
took delivery of the last superconducting main magnet for the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) on 27 November. This completes the full set of 1624 main magnets
required to build the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator.
Constructing this gigantic scientific machine is
a technological and logistical challenge for CERN and its industrial partners.
The LHC accelerator was initially conceived 22 years ago and approved for build
10 years later. Its realisation involved more than 200 manufacturers around the
world, producing vast quantities of complex components to tight precision.
The LHC is located inside a circular underground
tunnel of 27km circumference approximately 100 metres beneath Switzerland and
France. When fully operational, it will reach seven times more energy than the
most powerful particle accelerator currently in use. Scientists will use the LHC
to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding two beams of
protons travelling in opposite directions at close to the speed of light.
Thousands of magnets of different varieties and
sizes will be used to navigate the beams of particles around the accelerator.
These include the superconducting main magnets, of which 1232 ‘dipole’ magnets
of 15 metre lengths are used to guide the beams, and 392 ‘quadrupole’ magnets
of 5 to 7 metre lengths are used to focus the beams.
“The present achievement is an essential
milestone. The successful completion of all main magnets for the LHC accelerator
results from the dedication and efficient collaboration of teams from CERN,
other laboratories and many European industries. This is a promising step
towards achieving the three pillars of the LHC – the accelerator, experiments,
and computing – and the ultimate goal of scientific discoveries,”
summarised CERN’s Director General Robert Aymar.
Turning a scientific plan on paper into reality
is an immensely complex task. The design of the magnets presented one of the
most important technological challenges for the LHC. A high magnetic field is
required to bend the path of the particle beam around the accelerator. To
achieve this, the magnets must perform at the most efficient ‘superconducting’
state without loss of energy, which requires chilling to a temperature of -271°C
throughout the LHC’s operation – this is even colder than outer space!
CERN led the design and production processes of
the dipole magnets, assembled by three European partners: Babcock Noell GmbH
(Germany), Alstom MSA-Jeumont (a French consortium), and Ansaldo Superconduttori
(Italy). “We introduced new techniques that were not yet standard in
industry, including a new welding method for special stainless steel. We worked
closely with industrial partners to adapt state of the art technologies for
large-scale productions, while maintaining stringent standards and economic
efficiency,” said Lucio Rossi, head of the Magnets, Cryostats and
Superconductors group at CERN. Lyn Evans, LHC project leader, added, “This
is the end of more than six years of industrial production under very tight
quality control. It has required a very close collaboration between the magnet
manufacturers and CERN.” The quadrupole main magnets were designed by
CEA-DAPNIA laboratory (France), within the framework of the French special
contribution to the LHC, and assembled by ACCEL Instruments (Germany) with
similar challenges.
CERN’s industrial partners have also benefited
from the project to build the LHC. The processes of research and development,
coupled with the knowledge transfer from expertise only found in a world-class
particle physics laboratory, have resulted in innovations they can reapply to
other products in industry, from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines to
car manufacturing.
Assembly processes to complete the LHC are
expected to finish by mid-2007, in preparation for the start-up in November
2007. The LHC will be central to the next generation of experiments at CERN,
enabling scientific investigations that have never been possible before. A new
frontier of knowledge will shed light on the unresolved questions of science,
such as the search for the elusive Higgs boson to explain the origin of particle
mass, investigating the make up of dark matter, and the existence of extra
dimensions of space.
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