Status of LHC programme and magnet development

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a superconducting accelerator/collider for protons, heavy ions and electron-proton collisions in the multi-TeV energy range, which will be installed at CERN in the 27 km tunnel of LEP. This new facility will mainly consist of a double ring of high field superconducting magnets operating in superfluid helium at a temperature of 1.9 K. To reach the wanted beam energy (7 TeV for protons) the main dipole magnets will operate at about 8.4 T and the quadrupoles at 220 T/m field gradient. These main magnets have a two-in-one configuration with the magnetic channels for the two beams placed in a common yoke and cryostat. The LHC will have more than 10000 superconducting magnetic units. The arcs of the machine will require about 1250, 14 m long dipoles and 400, 3 m long quadrupoles. After a general outline of the project with more detailed information on the design of the magnets, the paper describes the state of magnet R&D and presents results of short models, among which one reached the record dipole field of 10.5 T, as well as of industry made full scale prototypes which have been successfully tested and measured.<>