This unique and novel CERN design allows the counter-rotating beams to be housed in a single cryogenic magnet assembly. For LHC protons to reach their collision energy of 14 TeV, the high technology superconducting electromagnets have to sustain a field of 8.65 Tesla, the highest ever used in an accelerator. A major milestone in magnet development was passed when the first prototype LHC bending magnet was successfully tested at CERN on 14 April 1994. The magnet was then powered again to 8.73 T and ran at this field level for about 15 min, without any further quench. To study the collisions of the tiny quarks locked deep inside protons requires a microscope on a larger scale than ever before built.
Researchers using it have to have sharp eyesight.
The interesting reactions when the hard quark grains in LHC's colliding protons clash head-on are extremely rare. Most of the time they graze past each other with little disturbance, providing less interesting physics. To see enough interesting hard quark collisions, the physicists have to push for very high proton-proton collision rates. For LHC, luminosities of a few times 1034 are needed, a hundred times higher than in any existing experiment. Only one in a billion of these will be a hard quark collision, and the detector's data capture system has to select and filter out this event and get to work on it rapidly, so as not to miss the next one.