The Official inauguration of the new CERN’s particle accelerator, the LHC, will take place on the 21st of October 2008, for the Heads of State and Government of CERN’s Member States, among other important guests. In this scope, Efacec is proud to announce its participation in this important event, as an Official Sponsor.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is an intergovernmental organization with 20 Member States. It has its seat in Geneva but straddles the Swiss-French border. Its objective is to facilitate advanced collaboration among European States in the field of high energy particle physics research. To this end CERN designs, constructs and runs the necessary particle accelerators and the associated experimental areas.
Three scientists from CERN received Nobel Prizes, awarded by the Swedish Academy. Besides this, CERN also attracts other Nobel Laureates wishing to use its facilities. At present, approximately 9000 physicists from research institutes world-wide use the CERN installations for their experiments.
Although CERN has been using several accelerators for its experiments, especially the Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP) which ran from 1989 to 2000, scientists were looking further into the future to continue their experiments in the domain of particle physics. As a consequence, they imagined re-using the LEP’s tunnel, a 27 km underground ring, to house a more powerful machine.
This idea led to the construction of the most sophisticated and powerful accelerator ever built in the world, called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), functioning at -271.3 ºC (1.9 K).
The LHC aims to accelerate and collide proton beams with an extremely high energy. The unprecedented energy may even reveal some unexpected results that no one has ever thought of!
By doing this, scientists expect to answer key unresolved questions in particle physics, namely related to matter’s mass, as well as the nature of dark matter and dark energy. The study of these subjects is one of the biggest challenges today in the fields of particle physics and cosmology.
Efacec has provided several solutions for CERN including power supply systems and discharger devices (Quench Heater Discharger), both used for the underground dipole magnets.
Another important Efacec mission was the supply of a SCADA/DMS system, for electrical power network management, installed at CERN’s Technical Infrastructure Control Room. Efacec also supplied 57 Remote Terminal Units (RTU) for CERN’s substations, integrating existing IED and digital protection relays, spanning from 400 kV to 66 kV, 18 kV and 3.3 kV, as well as for low voltage 400 V stations. |
