The Large Hadron Collider: a Challenging Machine

by Matteo Solfaroli (RM1)

Wednesday 20 May 2015, 16:30 → 18:00 Europe/Rome

Aula C. Voci (INFN - Padova)

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, located at the border between France and Switzerland. The LHC consists of 1572 superconducting circuits distributed along its 27 kilometers and a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way. In separated vacuum chambers where ultra-high vacuum is maintained, two counter-rotating beams travel at close to the speed of light before they are made to collide. The two beams are guided thanks to a magnetic fields of 8.33 T created by 1232 dipole magnets, operating in superfluid Helium at 1.9 K with currents up to 11 kA. Proton beams reach an energy of 350 MJ at 7 TeV before the collisions are set in the four detectors placed along the accelerator to study the effect of the collisions. The LHC, its complexity and the challenges that it will face will be discussed.