QUACO. Agreement and work order for phase 2

CERN has notified ELYTT ENERGY that it has been awarded a contract in the field of superconducting magnets for particle accelerators. (Framework Agreement and Work Order for Phase 2) under the QUACO PCP.

The ultimate goal of QUACO PCP is to manufacture a First-of-a-kind quadrupole magnet (MQYY) with two 90 mm apertures and a magnetic length of 3.67 m, operating at 1.9K.

The QuaCo (QUAdrupole COrrector) project will take the form of an EU pre-commercial procurement (PCP). In this project, a group of buyers (hereinafter referred as the “QuaCo Buyers Group”) led by CERN as the lead procurer will award R&D services contracts in parallel to several companies. The PCP will allow a comparison of competing alternative solution approaches for the development of the MQYY superconducting quadrupole magnet that will be used in the Q4 Cryoassembly on the HL-LHC project. The MQYY will be part of the Insertion Region (IR) magnets delivering the beams to the CMS and ATLAS experiments. MQYY belongs more specifically to the matching section of this IR magnets where it is used to match the optics from the arc (composed by the regular cells) to the final beam focusing elements (inner triplet).

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most recent and powerful accelerator constructed on the CERN site. The LHC machine accelerates and collides proton beams but also heavier ions up to lead. It is installed in a 27 km circumference tunnel, about 100 m underground. The LHC design is based on superconducting twin-aperture magnets which operate in a superfluid helium bath at 1.9 K.

High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) is a project aiming to upgrade the LHC collider after 2026 in order to maintain scientific progress and exploit its full capacity.