The 53rd and final replacement magnet for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was lowered into the accelerator’s tunnel recently, marking the end of repair work above ground.
The repair work follows the incident in September last year, when damaged magnets brought LHC operations to a halt.
Underground, the magnets are being interconnected, and new systems installed to prevent similar incidents happening again. The LHC is scheduled to restart in the autumn, and to run continuously until sufficient data has been accumulated for the LHC experiments to announce their first results.
In total 53 magnets were removed from Sector 3-4, with 16 that sustained minimal damage refurbished and put back into the tunnel. The remaining 37 were replaced by spares and will themselves be refurbished to provide spares for the future.
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