The CERN Control Centre

It is in this control room in spring 2008 that the champagne bottles will pop to celebrate the startup of Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. But the first bottles already were opened there. The new CERN Control Centre was officially inaugurated on March 16, a meeting day for the CERN Council, which represents the Member States of the Laboratory. To celebrate its startup, Council delegates visited the sleek centre, a futuristic-looking room filled with a multitude of monitoring screens.

The purpose of the CERN Control Centre (CCC) is to combine the control rooms of the Laboratory’s eight accelerators, as well as the piloting of cryogenics and technical infrastructures.  

The LHC is not an isolated machine: it will be fed by a succession of interconnected accelerators. Protons will be accelerated and formed in beams in four increasingly large machines before being injected with an energy of 450 GeV into the LHC’s 27–km ring. The beams will then be accelerated in the ring until their energy is increased by a factor of 15, to 7000 GeV. When that energy is reached, the beams will collide in the centres of the detectors. Each beam will consist of about 3000 bunches of protons, each bunch containing up to 100 billion protons.

The performance of the LHC depends on the injector chain that feeds it. The new centre will help control this extensive process by joining all of the accelerator operators with the engineering and cryogenics departments. By coordinating the process of injection, the CCC will guarantee a high-quality beam. 

The new centre also will manage the beams of CERN’s other facilities. Similar to a rail network that uses the same infrastructure to send passengers toward various destinations, the accelerators of CERN can transport several beams simultaneously and adapt each one to a given facility. It is this ability to deal with several beams at the same time that makes CERN a unique laboratory in its field of research. The 46-year-old Proton Synchrotron (PS), which is the oldest accelerator in service at CERN, prepares beams for the LHC, while feeding the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) and other facilities with various particles.

The new centre has 39 control consoles. During peak operation periods, there could be up to 13 operators working on any one shift, not counting the many experts responsible for assisting them. Built and installed in just 15 months, the centre started running on 1 February. The operators are already on site for the accelerator testing period, which must start this spring. And when the LHC is brought into service in 2008, the centre will be filled with emotion.

March 2006