Advanced Superconducting Technology for Global Science: The Large Hadron Collider at CERN

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), presently in construction at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research near Geneva (Switzerland), will be, upon its completion in 2005 and for the next twenty years, the most advanced research instrument of the world's high-energy physics community, providing access to the energy frontier above 1 TeV per elementary constituent. Re-using the 26.7-km circumference tunnel and infrastructure of the past LEP electron-positon collider, operated until 2000, the LHC will make use of advanced superconducting technology - high-field Nb-Ti superconducting magnets operated in superfluid helium and a cryogenic ultra-high vacuum system - to bring into collision intense beams of protons and ions at unprecedented values of center-of-mass energy and luminosity (14 TeV and 1034 cm-2.s-1, respectively with protons). After some ten years of focussed R&D, the LHC components are presently series-built in industry and procured through world-wide collaboration. After briefly recalling the physics goals, performance challenges and design choices of the machine, we describe its major technical systems, with particular emphasis on relevant advances in the key technologies of superconductivity and cryogenics, and report on its construction progress.