The LHC vacuum system

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, involves two proton storage rings with colliding beams of 7 TeV. The machine will be housed in the existing LEP tunnel and requires 16 m long superconducting bending magnets. The vacuum chamber will be the inner wall of the cryostat and hence at the temperature of the magnet cold bore, i.e. at 1.9 K and therefore a very good cryopump. To reduce the cryogenic power consumption, the heat load from synchrotron radiation and from the image currents in the vacuum chamber will be absorbed on a 'beam screen', which operates between 5 and 20 K, inserted in the magnet cold bore. The design pressure necessary for operation must provide a lifetime of several days and a further stringent requirement comes from the power deposition in the superconducting magnet coils due to protons scattered on the residual gas which could lead to a magnet quench. Cryopumping of gas on the cold surfaces provides the necessary low gas densities but it must be ensured that the vapour pressure of cryosorbed molecules, of which H/sub 2/ and He would be the most critical species, remains within acceptable limits. In the room temperature sections of the LHC, specifically in the experiments, the vacuum must be stable against ion induced desorption and ISR-type 'pressure bumps'.