The Large Hadron Collider, a personal recollection

The construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been a massive endeavor spanning almost 30 years from conception to commissioning. Building the machine with the highest possible energy (7 TeV) in the existing LEP tunnel of 27 km circumference and with a tunnel diameter of only 3.8m has required considerable innovation. The first was the development of an idea first proposed by Bob Palmer at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1978, where the two rings are integrated into a single magnetic structure. This compact 2-in-1 structure was essential for the LHC due to both the limited space available in the existing Large Electron-Positron collider tunnel and the cost. The second innovation was the bold move to use superfluid helium cooling on a massive scale, which was imposed by the need to achieve a high (8.3 T) magnetic field using an affordable Nb-Ti superconductor. In this article, no attempt is made to give a comprehensive review of the machine design. This can be found in the LHC Design Report {[}1], which gives a detailed description of the machine as it was built and comprehensive references. A more popular description of the LHC and its detectors can be found in {[}2]. Instead, this is a more personal account of the project from approval to commissioning, describing some of the main technologies and some of the trials and tribulations encountered in bringing this truly remarkable machine alive.