Infrastructure: LHC (Large Hadron Collider)
Project title: Development and production of new cryostats for the superconducting cable equipment required for the upgrade of CERN's Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC)
Main applicant: Tord Ekelöf, FREIA
Grant amount: 10 000 000 SEK for the period 2018-2021
Funder: Accessibility to infrastructure from the Swedish Research Council
There are several experimental signs of that the current Standard Model (SM) of Particle Physics is incomplete and needs to be replaced by a more general theory. To enable the search for new particles, that could indicate the nature of this more general theory, the plan is to upgrade by 2026 the instantaneous luminosity of LHC by an order of magnitude such that an integrated luminosity of 3000 events per femtobarn can be collected over the following decade. The increased luminosity will entail a corresponding increase in the radiation background in the LHC beam colliding regions which will be too high for the power sources feeding the superconducting magnets presently located at either side of these regions. These current sources, which deliver a current of ca 100 kA, must therefore be moved away about 100 m from the interaction regions which in turn will require superconducting cables of corresponding lengths to be constructed. New cryostats will be needed to connect the two types of superconducting cable used for this purpose. The Swedish Research Council (VR) and CERN has recently allocated funding for the financing of a collaboration between the FREIA Laboratory at Uppsala University, CERN in Geneva and RFR Solutions AB in Landskrona to design, test and manufacture the ten cryostats of the kind that is needed. CERN will provide the conceptual design drawings of the cryostats and UU/FREIA will, in collaboration with RFR Solutions AB, be responsible for developing the technical design drawings and for the manufacturing, assembly, qualification testing and delivery by the end of 2022 of these ten units.
