New Magnets for Large Hadron Collider Upgrade Successfully Pass Halfway Mark

A team from the Berkeley Lab ATAP Division and Berkeley Lab Engineering at Berkeley Lab has assembled and tested 11 of the 20 new superconducting magnets for installation at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle collider. These magnets utilize niobium-tin technology, which can produce much stronger magnetic fields to focus particle beams more tightly and promises to extend the capabilities of the LHC, leading to advances in fundamental scientific research and new discoveries in high-energy and particle physics.

The work is part of the ongoing contributions of the U.S. Accelerator Upgrade Project to the High Luminosity? LHC Accelerator Upgrade Project, or HL-LHC-AUP, which aims to increase the luminosity of the LHC significantly. The P5 report, released in December 2023, highlighted that the HL-LHC-AUP is “proceeding successfully with critical U.S. contributions” and will focus on addressing “key questions about the Higgs boson while searching for new particles and phenomena.”

“This achievement marks another significant milestone for the LHC upgrade and comes after the successful delivery of the first U.S.-built magnets to CERN last December,” says ATAP Division Director Cameron Geddes. “The team is doing an excellent job in building these more powerful magnets, which will enhance the performance of the LHC and push the frontiers of scientific research and exploration.”

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