In the past four years, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have accomplished unprecedented feats of physics, all with their particle accelerator working at half its design capacity.
Last week the US LHC Accelerator Research Program, or LARP, successfully tested a new type of magnet required to boost the power of the LHC—or the luminosity of its particle beams—by a factor of 10.
LARP is a collaboration among the US Department of Energy’s Brookhaven, Fermi, Lawrence Berkeley and SLAC national laboratories, working in partnership with CERN.
The improved magnets are one of the most critical components in a series of LHC upgrades that will be implemented over the next ten years. In the accelerator, magnets squeeze and focus beams of charged particles, directing them to a point of high-energy collision inside a detector. The new magnets, along with other upgrades, will allow the LHC to collect a larger amount of data at higher energies, making it possible to search for more massive potentially hidden particles than ever before.