LHC portal

Even though the LHC has just started its journey with the successful commissioning we've all witnessed, they're already thinking a few steps ahead.

I know that higher collision energies is what really thrills the majority of us, avid LHC enthusiasts. Nevertheless, physicists working at the main LHC experiments are probably more concerned with getting the greatest amount of events within the shortest possible time frame.

Thus, a new generation of superconducting magnets which should allow a significant increase in the beams luminosity was already tested as you can read in the following article:

http://www.physorg.com/news180185602.html

That's an improvement on the isabelle project where they decided to build the collider before the magnets had been developed.

Whwn this is ready and proven (say 10 years), will this be a shut down LHC for 12 months and replace just some of the magnets job? or is a total rip out and rebuild of everything in the tunnels?

Dave

morgad wrote:Whwn this is ready and proven (say 10 years), will this be a shut down LHC for 12 months and replace just some of the magnets job? or is a total rip out and rebuild of everything in the tunnels?

Dave

I don't know in detail what the plans are but I believe the price is something like 1 - 1.5 billion so I guess it's probably somewhere between the two.