The technical challenges of the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a 27 km circumference hadron collider, built at CERN to explore the energy frontier of particle physics. Approved in 1994, it was commissioned and began operation for data taking in 2009. The design and construction of the LHC presented many design, engineering and logistical challenges which involved pushing a number of technologies well beyond their level at the time. Since the start-up of the machine, there has been a very successful 3-year run with an impressive amount of data delivered to the LHC experiments. With an increasingly large stored energy in the beam, the operation of the machine itself presented many challenges and some of these will be discussed. Finally, the planning for the next 20 years has been outlined with progressive upgrades of the machine, first to nominal energy, then to progressively higher collision rates. At each stage the technical challenges are illustrated with a few examples.

The discovery and measurements of a Higgs boson

“…In 2012, the LHC [25] achieved the record instantaneous luminosity of L = 7 × 10 33 cm −2 s −1 by circulating high-intensity beams consisting of about 1300 bunches separated by 50 ns, with 150 billion protons per bunch, and a transverse size of about 20 µm when colliding in ATLAS and CMS. The integrated luminosity delivered to each experiment during Run 1 was approximately L · dt ∼ 30 fb −1 , most of which was at √ s = 8 TeV.…”

FCC-ee: Your Questions Answered

“…A brief account of the LEP-LHC transition period can be found in Ref. [105]. The Large Electron Positron collider was shut down on 2 November 2000, to make way for the installation of the Large Hadron Collider in the same tunnel [106], with an envisaged transition time of about four years.…”

“…The Large Electron Positron collider was shut down on 2 November 2000, to make way for the installation of the Large Hadron Collider in the same tunnel [106], with an envisaged transition time of about four years. The LEP dismantling [107] started on 27 November 2000 and, after three months, the most critical two-thirds of the LEP ring had been emptied [105]. Surveying for the LHC started in November 2001 in the empty LEP tunnel [108], so LEP dismantling took less than a year before work for the LHC could start.…”

Overview of Identified Challenges in the Development Process of Superconducting Accelerator Magnets

“…Apart from the challenges identified in the abovementioned references, various books about CERN-specific challenges within an international science environment have been written for the general audience [18,19].…”