CERN LHC PARTICLE ACCELERATOR TO SEARCH FOR HIGGS BOSON , NEW PHYSICS BEYOND THE STANDARD MODEL, DARK MATTER AND DARK ENERGY IN THE UNIVERSE

AFT high-power ferrite circulators and RF loads support the LHC experiment in the search for the Higgs boson and new high energy physics.
At the European research center CERN near Geneva, the 27 km ring tunnel previously housed the LEP particle accelerator, an electron-positron storage ring collider.  AFT has been a major supplier to CERN for many years, with unique state-of-the-art ferrite circulators operating in LEP at RF power levels up to 1.3 MW CW into a continuous short circuit.

LEP was dismantled and replaced with the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) in the same 27 km tunnel.  LHC is a proton-proton collider and can also operate with heavy ion beams ( A run with lead ion beams was made in 2011).  LHC is the most complex and costly machine built by mankind and incorporates the world's largest super-helium cryogenic plant.  Particles are accelerated to almost the speed of light and the counter-rotating particle beams are collided at four detector locations (ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb) around the 27 km ring.  The resulting showers of sub-nuclear particles are analyzed by thousands of physicists working on the LHC project.

The search is on for the Higgs boson (a theoretically-predicted particle thought to impart mass to the other known particles), supersymmetry (SUSY),  to explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe and what constitutes dark matter and dark energy.  LHC has identified that the Higgs boson, if it exists in the expected form, is likely to be found in the mass range 116 to 127 GeV.  Heavy ion collisions in LHC can produce a micro-fireball of quark-gluon plasma that emulates conditions thought to exist in the nascent universe in the first seconds after the Big Bang and before the elements were formed.  LHC has verified and refined the major elements of the Standard Model and discovered a new particle, the χ _b(3P) which is based on the heavy bottom quark.

AFT is proud to continue to be the supplier of ferrite circulators and RF loads to CERN to protect the high power klystron RF generators in LHC.  Similar AFT high power ferrite circulator products are in service in major particle accelerator laboratories world-wide.