CERN Has Begun Disconnecting The Large Hadron Collider

Image Courtesy: CERN

CERN has begun dismantling sections of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as part of a major upgrade designed to significantly increase the number of particle collisions produced by the world’s largest particle accelerator.

The work focuses on replacing key focusing magnets around the ATLAS and CMS experiments with a more powerful generation of superconducting magnets. The upgrade is part of the High-Luminosity LHC project, which is intended to provide researchers with substantially more data for studying fundamental particles and the forces that govern the universe.

Stretching 27 kilometers around the French-Swiss border, the LHC uses thousands of magnets to control its particle beams. Among the most important are the inner triplets, groups of three quadrupole magnets positioned near the collider’s major experiments. They focus the beams immediately before particles enter the collision points.

Tighter beams increase the probability of collisions, raising the accelerator’s luminosity. More collisions give physicists more data to examine, potentially allowing them to study rare particle interactions in greater detail.

During the LHC’s third long shutdown, known as LS3, CERN has begun removing the existing inner triplets. Teams started dismantling sections on either side of ATLAS and CMS on September 7, with 28 superconducting magnets scheduled for removal.

The replacement magnets represent a major technological step forward. The current systems use niobium-titanium superconducting technology, while the new magnets will use niobium-tin coils capable of producing magnetic fields of up to 11.3 tesla. That is approximately 40% stronger than the fields generated by the existing magnets.

CERN plans to install 16 cryostats and 28 cryo-assemblies as part of the upgrade. The first new quadrupole is expected to enter the LHC tunnel at the beginning of 2029.

The changes will primarily benefit ATLAS and CMS, which will receive the new high-performance inner triplets. ALICE and LHCb have different experimental requirements and will not receive the same increase in instantaneous luminosity, although their existing inner triplets will also be upgraded so they can benefit from the collider’s overall improvements.

The magnets currently being removed were installed between 2005 and 2007 and have supported nearly two decades of LHC operations. Their replacement marks another major stage in CERN’s transition toward the High-Luminosity LHC era, with the upgraded machine expected to provide researchers with a much larger volume of collision data.