Southampton cryogenic engineering to help power Large Hadron Collider upgrade

Engineers from the University of Southampton will develop the technology required to cold power new superconducting magnets in a major upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider.

The University has been awarded £2.1m from the Science and Technologies Facilities Council, matched with cash and in-kind funding from CERN, to fund the development and manufacture of new cryomodules.

The new phase of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will upgrade its magnetic fields from eight to as high as 11 Tesla to continue its high energy experiments.

Professor Yifeng Yang, of the School of Engineering, says: “Since the inception of the LHC, the University of Southampton has been a long-term partner of CERN in developing innovative approaches for the cold powering of superconducting magnets. For the LHC upgrade, we have carried out initial proof of concept tests of the new superconducting cables and devised the baseline strategy for cooling and controlling them.”

In phase one, Southampton engineers developed a prototype multifunctional cryostat as the interfacing and control centre for the new cold powering system. Within phase two, they will be delivering a total of nine of the intersection/distribution/control boxes to be installed at the LHC.

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