The Large Hadron Collider is perhaps the largest and highest energy particle accelerator in existence and the largest human-made machine in the world.

Built by CERN (the European Council for Nuclear Research), it involved 10,000 scientists, and the cooperation of more than 100 countries.

It is located in a huge tunnel 27 kilometers in circumference, 175 meters underground, below the Franco-Swiss border, and near Geneva.

In 2018-19, it entered a shutdown period to make technical improvements that would allow it to achieve higher collision energies.

In 2021, it carried out a start-up process that ended on July 4, with new findings.

In fact, CERN announced the discovery of new exotic particles, being the beginning of the new series of tests for 4 years at higher energies, with the intention of confirming current theories, or discovering new physics.

For the Large Hadron Collider to accelerate particles to near the speed of light, it requires powerful electromagnets.

Specifically, it has 1,232 dipole magnets that allow the beams to maintain a circular path, and 392 superconducting quadrupole supermagnets, which are used to direct the beams to four intersection points, where collisions take place.

In addition, additional magnets are used to correct small field imperfections.

In total, around 10,000 superconducting magnets are installed, with a total weight of 27 tons each.

This is what made it possible for the Higgs boson to be discovered 10 years ago, also known as the “divine particle” since it is the one that gives mass to elementary particles.

A discovery to which we made our contribution

How?

As we have seen, the Large Hadron Collider is made up of an incredible network of enormous electromagnetic magnets.

Evidently, for the maintenance and start-up of this great machine, tools were required that would allow it to work in environments where the magnetic fields are very powerful, as is the case of the Large Hadron Collider.

CERN relied on the quality of our non-magnetic titanium tools, which we have been talking about in recent weeks on our blog.

At the time, at EGA Master, we had been manufacturing and supplying these tools for the organization for two years, before the boson finding was published.

Top left: Our Industrial Managing Director Iñaki Garmendia, together with Rolf Dieter-Heuer, then General Manager of CERN. On the right, an article from the Spanish Newspaper Diario de Álava, mentioning our small contribution to the discovery of the Higgs boson. Below left, example of the quadrupole supermagnets used in the Large Hadron Collider.

Subsequently, CERN has continued to rely on the quality of our fully antimagnetic titanium tools for its maintenance and repair operations at its facilities in Geneva, Switzerland.

It is one of the case studies that we are most proud of, contributing with our premium industrial tools to innovation in the field of physics.