CERN has begun disconnecting the Large Hadron Collider

What happened

CERN has started replacing some of the Large Hadron Collider’s most important magnets as part of its High-Luminosity upgrade. That should create far more collisions for the ATLAS and CMS experiments to analyze, giving physicists a much larger window into the fundamental workings of the universe.

Share: Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIN Email FULL STORY The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) stretches 27 km around and relies on thousands of magnets of different types - dipoles, quadrupoles, sextupoles, octupoles, decapoles, etc. Some of the most important are known as inner triplets.

These groups of three quadrupole magnets (hence the name) sit on both sides of the LHC's four main experiments. Their job is to focus the particle beams as tightly as possible just before the particles collide inside the detectors.

That makes the inner triplets essential for increasing the LHC's luminosity, i.e. the number of collisions that occur in a given period of time.

More luminosity means more collisions, giving researchers more data to analyze. The work is taking place during the third long shutdown (LS3).