Andy Lin, left, lead cabling technician, and Elizabeth Lee, a quality assurance engineer, install diagnostics on the Rutherford Cabling machine at Berkeley Lab while complying with social-distancing and safety rules. The machine, equipped with dozens of spools of wire, produces high-current superconducting cables for the High-Luminosity LHC Accelerator Upgrade Project. (Credit: Elizabeth Lee/Berkeley Lab)
Note: This article is the final part of a recurring series highlighting Berkeley Lab’s ongoing role in international science collaborations during the COVID-19 pandemic.
While COVID-19 risks had led to a temporary halt in fabrication work on high-power superconducting magnets built by a collaboration of three U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national labs for an upgrade of the world’s largest particle collider at CERN in Europe, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are still carrying out some project tasks.
“Scientific and engineering staff continue to work on project documentation, procurements, and planning,” said Dan Cheng, a Berkeley Lab engineer who oversees magnet assembly activities at Berkeley Lab for the three-lab U.S. Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Accelerator Upgrade Project.
Ian Pong, a scientist in charge of cable fabrication – the other task that is managed by Berkeley Lab – added, “We actually just had a couple of new staff join the team, and we took the opportunity to provide training also.”
The project is part of an international effort to upgrade CERN’s LHC to provide for a larger number of particle collisions – the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC)
