Two wire samples, both for carrying 13'000Amperes. I sample is copper. The other is the Niobium Titanium wiring used in the LHC magnets. The high magnetic fields needed for guiding particles around the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ring are created by passing 12’500 amps of current through coils of superconducting wiring. At very low temperatures, superconductors have no electrical resistance and therefore no power loss. The LHC is the largest superconducting installation ever built. The magnetic field must also be extremely uniform. This means the current flowing in the coils has to be very precisely controlled. Indeed, nowhere before has such precision been achieved at such high currents. Magnet coils are made of copper-clad niobium–titanium cables — each wire in the cable consists of 9’000 niobium–titanium filaments ten times finer than a hair. The cables carry up to 12’500 amps and must withstand enormous electromagnetic forces. At full field, the force on one metre of magnet is comparable to the weight of a jumbo jet. Coil winding requires great care to prevent movements as the field changes. Friction can create hot spots which “quench” the magnet and ruin its superconductivity. A quench in any of the LHC superconducting magnets would stop machine operation. 50’000 tonnes of steel sheets are used to make the magnet yokes that keep the wiring firmly in place. The yokes constitute approximately 80% of the accelerator's weight and, placed side by side, stretch over 20 km!

Slice through an LHC superconducting dipole (bending) magnet. The slice includes a cut through the magnet wiring (niobium titanium), the beampipe and the steel magnet yokes. Particle beams in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have the same energy as a high-speed train, squeezed ready for collision into a space narrower than a human hair. Huge forces are needed to control them. Dipole magnets (2 poles) are used to bend the paths of the protons around the 27 km ring. Quadrupole magnets (4 poles) focus the proton beams and squeeze them so that more particles collide when the beams’ paths cross. There are 1232 15m long dipole magnets in the LHC.

The high magnetic fields needed for guiding particles around the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ring are created by passing 12’500 amps of current through coils of superconducting wiring. At very low temperatures, superconductors have no electrical resistance and therefore no power loss. The LHC is the largest superconducting installation ever built. The magnetic field must also be extremely uniform. This means the current flowing in the coils has to be very precisely controlled. Indeed, nowhere before has such precision been achieved at such high currents. Magnet coils are made of copper-clad niobium–titanium cables — each wire in the cable consists of 9’000 niobium–titanium filaments ten times finer than a hair. The cables carry up to 12’500 amps and must withstand enormous electromagnetic forces. At full field, the force on one metre of magnet is comparable to the weight of a jumbo jet. Coil winding requires great care to prevent movements as the field changes. Friction can create hot spots which “quench” the magnet and ruin its superconductivity. A quench in any of the LHC superconducting magnets would stop machine operation. 50’000 tonnes of steel sheets are used to make the magnet yokes that keep the wiring firmly in place. The yokes constitute approximately 80% of the accelerator's weight and, placed side by side, stretch over 20 km!