Superconducting magnets: an enabling technology for the discovery of the Higgs boson

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This webinar is focused on the technology of the superconducting magnets used in the LHC. After reviewing the equations for an electromagnet, we show how superconductivity enables much larger magnetic fields in very compact devices, thanks to the possibility of increasing the current density in the windings by more than two order of magnitudes with respect to resistive conductors. We then outline the development of superconducting accelerator magnets from the ISR quadrupoles, up to the LHC and beyond.

We conclude by describing the successive increases of LHC energy since 2008 up to the 6.8 TeV per beam recently achieved, and show how the control of field imperfections has been an essential element for reaching the ultimate luminosity.

Ezio Todesco was born in Bologna Italy, where he got a PhD in physics. In the 90’s, after a master thesis at CERN, he worked at the Italian national institute of nuclear physics (INFN) on topics related to nonlinear dynamics of particle accelerators, and long-term stability in the planned Large Hadron Collider. He joined the magnet group at CERN in 1998, and has been in charge of the field quality follow-up of the LHC main dipoles and quadrupole during the five-year-long magnet production. After the completion of the production phase, he has been in charge of the magnetic field model of the LHC, following the initial commissioning and the successive energy increases up to 13 TeV centre of mass. Then, he has been involved in the studies of the LHC luminosity upgrade, and he leads the interaction region magnets for HL-LHC since the beginning of the project in 2015.