World’s largest cryogenic refrigerator gets giant cold boxes at CERN

CERN has recently installed two massive cold boxes at the ATLAS and CMS experiment sites as part of the upgraded cryogenic system for the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), scheduled to begin operations around 2030. These cold boxes, each 16 meters long and 3.5 meters in diameter, were manufactured by Linde in Germany and transported via a complex route involving river barges and road transport. Their installation follows the earlier placement of six compression units and is critical to increasing the cooling capacity needed for the HL-LHC, which will feature more powerful focusing magnets and new cavities generating higher thermal loads. The existing LHC is already the world’s largest cryogenic installation, maintaining 23 kilometers of its 27-kilometer ring at 1.9 kelvin (-271 °C) using superfluid helium refrigerators. To support the HL-LHC’s increased luminosity and associated thermal demands, two additional large refrigerators are being added to the eight units currently