Following a three-year shut down the LHC was restarted on March 22nd 2022 at 08:00. For the next four years it will run with an energy boosted from 6.5 TeV to 6.8 TeV per beam, allowing for a new phase of experimentation.
Amazingly, as for every restart, the vacuum controllers of Volotek, a Swiss electronics company based in Geneva, performed the important task of verifying the quality of the vacuum level before any particle beam entered the tube. The Volotek Controllers are part of the indispensable monitoring and vacuum engineering distributed all along the LHC ring and participates in guaranteeing the proper circulation of the beam. Presently, the Bayard-Alpert gauge (type SVT 305) with the Volotek Controller remain the baseline instruments for the LHC vacuum monitoring. This fundamental vacuum measurement technique, introduced by CERN for the ISR in the 1970s still serves all high vacuum measurements at CERN.
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