CERN has begun disconnecting the Large Hadron Collider

CERN has started replacing some of the Large Hadron Collider’s most important magnets as part of its High-Luminosity upgrade. The new superconducting magnets will produce fields about 40% stronger, allowing particle beams to be squeezed more tightly before they collide. That should create far more collisions for the ATLAS and CMS experiments to analyze, giving physicists a much larger window into the fundamental workings of the universe.

CERN has begun disconnecting the Large Hadron Collider. Some of the most important are known as inner triplets. These groups of three quadrupole magnets (hence the name) sit on both sides of the LHC’s four main experiments.

Their job is to focus the particle beams as tightly as possible just before the particles collide inside the detectors. The tighter the beams are "compressed," the greater the chance that particles will collide. That makes the inner triplets essential for increasing the LHC’s luminosity, i.e.