The Large Hadron Collider project: historical account

Abstract This article gives a historical account of the origin and the development of the design of the Large Hadron Collider, the low-temperature superconducting collider being built at CERN. The basic choices of the superconducting technology, based on NbTi cables cooled at 1.9 K by superfluid helium, and of the magnet structure, the twin-aperture configuration, are reviewed in some details. The centre-of-mass energy is 14 TeV for protons and 1148 TeV for lead ions ( 2.76 TeV / u ) . The expected luminosity is 10 34 cm - 2 s - 1 for protons and 10 27 cm - 2 s - 1 for lead ions. After a long phase of construction and testing of magnet models and prototypes, the industrial production of all components is well under way, with hundreds of magnet dipoles and tens of quadrupoles on site, ready for installation in the tunnel, which was constructed and used for LEP.