Geneva Physicists Look to Future,but their Tunnels are Being Built Now

The huge caverns being excavated deep underground near Geneva, Switzerland, don’t look that different to those under nearby mountains, ferrying rail and auto traffic through the Alps.

But these tunnels serve very different cargo: a train tube isn’t be expected to hold cryomagnets working at minus 270° C, or support miles of massive instruments focusing proton beams at micrometer accuracy.This is the tunneling now underway as a large cast of engineering firms dig and prepare a multi-year, billion-dollar upgrade to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, operated by CERN, the European organization for nuclear research.

Project manager Pieter Mattelaer has been donning a hard hat in service of this operation for four years, overseeing a precise schedule an accelerated pace even before the first heavy machines showed up onsite at the end of 2018.

There’s still a long way to go; Mattelaer will be watching over the dig for through 2020. Final lining underground is set for 2021. After that comes the complicated underground installation of delicate, irregularly-shaped and large scientific instruments and the accompanying power train: cryogenic systems, superconducting links and magnets.