Hadron Collider (LHC) e HI LUMI - Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare

The High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) project aims to crank up the performance of the LHC in order to increase the potential for discoveries after 2029. The objective is to increase the integrated luminosity by a factor of 10 beyond the LHC’s design value. Luminosity is an important indicator of the performance of an accelerator: it is proportional to the number of collisions that occur in a given amount of time. The higher the luminosity, the more data the experiments can gather to allow them to observe rare processes. But HI Lumi also represents a technological challenge, as it involves the development of frontier technologies, not yet available “on the market”. The international scientific community and, in Italy, the INFN have been working on this challenge from the very beginning, in close collaboration with the industrial world.

The High-Luminosity LHC, which should be operational from the beginning of 2029, will increase the number of collisions to study fundamental components of matter in more detail. It will allow physicists to study known mechanisms in greater detail, such as the Higgs boson, and to observe rare new phenomena that might reveal themselves.

HI-Lumi will increase the LHC’s integrated luminosity by a factor of 10. To achieve this major upgrade, scientists and engineers are optimizing many of the collider’s parameters. Several new key technologies, some of which are completely innovative, are being developed within the scope of the project.

LHC dipole magnets in the tunnel (© CERN, Ordan, Julien Marius)

HiLumi high-brightness cryostat prototype © CERN, M Brice)

In detail, Italy, with the INFN, is engaged in the development of new quadrupole magnets for the ATLAS and CMS experiments on which are working both researchers and technicians from the INFN division of Genoa, in collaboration with ASG Superconductor, a leading company in the international field for superconducting magnets, and staff of the LASA Laboratory, the Accelerator and Applied Superconductivity Laboratory of the INFN and the State University of Milan, in collaboration with SAES RIAL Vacuum of Parma, a highly innovative company in vacuum and cryogenic systems used in accelerators and research.

HI Lumi is not only a large technological undertaking, but it is also an important civil engineering work which involves the construction of new tunnels and new caverns in correspondence with the ATLAS and CMS experiments.

The project is led by CERN with the support of an international collaboration of 44 institutions in 20 countries – the vast majority in various European countries among which Italy, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom – and including a number of CERN’s non-Member States such as the United States, Japan and Canada.

High Luminosity LHC