The huge caverns being excavated deep underground near Geneva, Switzerland, don’t look that different to those under nearby mountains, ferrying rail and auto traffic through the Alps. But these tunnels serve very different cargo: a train tube isn’t be expected to hold cryomagnets working at minus 270° C, or support miles of massive instruments focusing proton beams at micrometer accuracy.

This is the tunneling now underway as a large cast of engineering firms dig and prepare a multi-year, billion-dollar upgrade to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, operated by CERN, the European organization for nuclear research.

项目经理Pieter Mattelaer已经为这项操作服务了四年，一直在为这项操作服务，以监督精确的时间表，即使在2018年底的第一台重型机器出现在现场之前，也有一个加速的速度。还有很长的路要走。Mattelaer将在2020年进行挖掘。地下最终衬里定于2021年。此后，复杂的地下安装精致，不规则形状和大型科学仪器以及随附的动力序列：低温系统，超导链路和磁铁。

The LHC is a 27-km circuit located near the airport outside Geneva. It runs under Swiss and French soil for the most part situated in a 3.8-meter track, about 100 m deep, housing a pair of vacuum pipes which contain particle beams. These tunnels periodically open into massive caverns packed tightly with detecting machines that look like they belong on a spaceship. The LHC was first completed in 2008, but construction at CERN takes on a long-term cast that is out of the ordinary. It is a living object: plans are cast years and decades ahead. There are engineers and planners at CERN actively discussing projects for 2040 and even 2080.

The LHC is in shutdown mode while the refit takes place. In order to get new instruments and power train into the collider loop, engineers are constructing two new shafts, 10 m in diameter and 60 m deep (with caverns adding another 25 m, totaling about 85 m deep). There’s about a kilometer’s worth of gallery access tunnels, consisting of wide, high caverns, along with narrower power converter galleries, service and safety tunnels and vertical linkage cores for cabling and service. Crews are busy at two CERN sites along the collider.

当安装了仪器和功率升级并且加速器返回在线时，首先在2021年，然后在2026年再次进行关闭和改装项目之后，研究人员将能够使用可生成的碰撞数量的10倍进行实验就是现在。它的评分已经在13 eV中，在给定的瞬间使用足够的能量为附近的日内瓦供电，因为质子流以近光速飞行加速器。光束线在梁碰撞发生的环周围的四个点相交。质子互相撞向彼此，每种质子碰撞都会产生像火花，新形式的基本颗粒。

Physicists can’t visually study the collisions: the particles collisions are reflected in data picked up by the LHC’s detectors. These can be massive assemblies. One of them weighs much as the Eiffel Tower; another, twice as much. The subatomic particles they detect decay and vanish almost instantly. Even so, they exist long enough to leave evidence for the scientists to examine. There is a dizzying variety but most famous currently is the elusive Higgs Boson, a particle predicted to exist in previous decades but actually observed at the LHC, earning a Nobel Prize. All told these particle studies explore and map the fundamental building blocks of matter—the very stuff of the universe.

现在，LHC发生的碰撞在鲍尔和岩石之间。马特拉（Mattelaer）于2015年加入了董事会，并有两年的时间来招标工程和建筑合同，以便在2018年底之前在现场获得重型设备并挖掘轴，并设立了2019年和2020年的隧道挖掘。为两个地点提供团队：一个带有瑞士建筑许可证和工程合资企业的瑞士站点，以及带有法国建筑许可证和合资企业的法国地点。CERN是一个由23个国家组成的组织，因此，在该网站上开设了一致的努力，以向公平的国际竞标开放行业。

瑞士的JV Marti Meyrin与Marti Tunnel及其德国和奥地利的武器一起参加了两个地点的建筑联盟，由瑞士的JV Marti Meyrin驶向一个。另一方面，通过Implenia（在Gotthard Base Tunnel上的经验）和Baresel Tunnelbau。工程合资企业包括设计和建筑管理的其他几个成员。参与的是Rocksoil，这是一家专业的隧道公司，在意大利完成所有地铁和地铁工作。Setec，总部位于巴黎和里昂，伦巴第，Artelia和Pini，三个工程咨询公司。

The first digs started in 2018. By February 2019, the contractor dispatched Marti and Implenia custom compact tunnel excavators to the bottom of the main shafts. The machines are powered by electricity to dampen vibrations. Steel radial rock bolts went into the shaft at Point 5, the French site at Cressy. At Point 1, the Swiss site at Meyrin, lattice girders went in every meter or two; these were then embedded in 25cm of shotcrete. By this point the shafts had been sunk to the floor, enough so that a reporter could tour the bottom as the rock bolts were installed that would eventually secure a concrete ring beam at the intersection of the shaft and cavern.

At Meyrin, Marti employs a custom 50-tonne Dutch-built overhead crane for lowering excavators and equipment into the shaft. Implenia Baresel uses a custom-built, German-manufactured 50-ton gantry crane to do the job at Cressy. The Meyrin shaft was big enough to take down a custom-made gantry, which was installed on rails as the horizontal digs got underway. It is being used to install precast invert units, to be followed by the waterproofing cradle and final lining frameworks.

Meanwhile, researchers around the world are looking ahead to getting instruments in these places. University College London physicist Jon Butterworth, who works with the ATLAS detector at Meyrin—just one of the LHC’s big instruments—says it will be an enormously complex operation. For ATLAS alone it means removing the whole of the inner tracking detector, with the old one already showing radiation damage, and replacing it with new detector, a 3-m-long cylinder 1.5 m in diameter.

不过，达到这一点是一项主要任务。阿特拉斯本身具有7,000吨，其支撑结构，巨大的环形磁铁，氩气和瓷砖量热量计，其雄伟的雄性雄性雄钟很棒。直径为25 m，长46 m，所有人都说了8000万传感器，涵盖了网球场的面积。加拿大粒子加速器中心Triumf正在领导国际努力开发移动冷冻模块，冷却至2 kelvin（-456°F），其中包含工业冷冻箱大小的盒子内的加工Niobium通道。这些模块将蛋白质束倾斜以获得更多的碰撞：计划将16个放置在LHC中，八个Atlas和8个用于Cressy的14,000吨CMS检测器。这些仪器在微米和亚微米水平上排列。

Jens Dilling, TRIUMF’s associate lab director for physical sciences, says vibrational requirements and mechanical drift requirements are very tight. “It’s probably similar to an advanced mining operation where you bring heavy equipment underground in very tight constraints,” he says. Butterworth points out that most of the workers at CERN are not physicists—they are engineers. Researchers like him working on the instruments talk to technical coordinators and accelerator physicists, and they talk to the civil engineers doing the building. And when the upgrade is all fixed the instruments will be packed so tightly into the caverns that it’s hard to imagine the scale, Butterworth says, scale he recalls from past tours.

他说：“您看不到地图集长50 m。”“当它建造时，这是另一回事。像地下大教堂。一个装满电缆，磁铁和电线的大教堂。”