TEION KOGAKU (Journal of Cryogenics and Superconductivity Society of Japan)

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is now under construction at CERN, Geveva, to study frontier researches of particle physics. The LHC is the biggest superconducting accelerator using the most advanced cryogenics and applied superconductivities. The accelerator and large scale detectors for particle physics experiments are being constructed by collaboration with European countries and also by participation with non-CERN countries worldwide. In 1995, the Japanese government decided to take on a share in the LHC project with funding and technological contributions. KEK contributes to the development of low beta insertion superconducting quadrupole magnets and of components of the ATLAS detector by collaboration with university groups. Some Japanese companies have received contracts for technically key elements such as superconducting cable, cold compressor, nonmagnetic steel, polyimide film, and so on. An outline of the LHC project and Japanese contributions are described.

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The historic story of the superconducting (SC) magnet for MHD ETL Mark V Facility (cf. Fig. 1) is presented. This SC magnet was developed in the MHD Project (1966-75), which was one of the first MITI/AIST Large-Scale R & D Projects and the first national project for superconductor applications in Japan. This SC magnet had been the largest in Japan through 1982 when the Japanese LCT coil was made by JAERI. It was completed after many difficulties, some fatal and some trivial, because of a lack of knowledge, before it could generate maximum magnetic field 7T with stored energy 65MJ in 1973. Because technological problems had piled up and because no management know-how of national projects on technology development had been accumulated before then in the forefront of worldwide technological advances, “step by step” advances and “trial and error” attempts in the progress of the project had to be done over again. The paper is divided into three parts. Part I (Ref. 12) described the magnet design concept and the conductor tests. In this part II, the failures in exciting the magnet, the repair of the magnet system and the re-challenge with success are described.

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