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LHC superconducting quadrupole magnet

LHC Milestones

Journey to a new frontier

The LHC accelerator was originally conceived in the 1980s and approved for construction by the CERN Council in late 1994. Turning this ambitious scientific plan into reality proved to be an immensely complex task.

Civil engineering work to excavate underground caverns to house the huge detectors for the experiments started in 1998. Five years later, the last cubic metre of ground was finally dug for the whole project.

Numerous state-of-the-art technologies were pushed even further to meet the accelerator's exacting specifications and unprecedented demands.

Anticipating the colossal amount of data the LHC's experiments would produce (nearly 1% of the world’s information production rate), a new approach to data storage, management, sharing and analysis was created in the LHC Computing Grid project.

For more than a decade, building the LHC had been a dream for many who have worked hard to bring it to completion. Finally we can retell the story of this adventure in a journey, from a dream to a reality…

Follow the adventure