Niobium LEP 2 accelerating cavities

An accelerating cavity from LEP. This could be cut open to show the layer of niobium on the inside. Operating at 4.2 degrees above absolute zero, the niobium is superconducting and carries an accelerating field of 6 million volts per metre with negligible losses. Each cavity has a surface of 6 m2. The niobium layer is only 1.2 microns thick, ten times thinner than a hair. Such a large area had never been coated to such a high accuracy. A speck of dust could ruin the performance of the whole cavity so the work had to be done in an extremely clean environment. These challenging requirements pushed European industry to new achievements. 256 of these cavities were used in an upgrade of the LEP accelerator to double the energy of the particle beams.