Fibre to provide communications links within world’s largest particle accelerator
Fujikura today announced that its radiation resistant single mode optical fibre has been selected by CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, to provide communication links within the world’s largest particle accelerator – the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – near Geneva, Switzerland.
Fujikura will supply 2,500km of fibre to collect beam instrumentation data from the LHC. To provide reliable communications, the fibre must be able to withstand localised radiation levels of up to 20 kGy/year – enough to cause radiation-induced attenuation in normal optical fibre.
“Fujikura’s radiation resistant fibre will allow us to gather data consistently from the LHC collimator and beam cleaning zones where radiation is at its highest,” said Luit Koert de Jonge at CERN. “We have set ourselves a November 2007 deadline for the LHC to be operational and therefore needed a reliable partner to provide this core element, which is an essential part of our communications network.”
Additionally, Fujikura supplied over 100km of radiation resistant 12 way multimode ribbon fibre for data readout within the ATLAS inner detector. The location of the fibre is close to the beam pipe and expected to receive a maximum dose of 300kGy (Si).
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN
“We have tested samples of the same Fujikura fibre up to much larger doses,” said Dr. Tony Weidberg, of Oxford University, who is working at CERN. “In fact, we found only a very small increase in attenuation, about 0.03db/m for a dose up to 1.4 MGy(Si)."
Robert Walker, Business Development Manager at Fujikura Europe Ltd, commented: “As nuclear research becomes increasingly important to our understanding of the universe, technology must be developed to allow the ground-breaking experiments conducted by organisations like CERN to take place. To provide a fibre that can withstand such high levels of radiation is an achievement of which we are extremely proud. We will continue to develop speciality fibres that are able to provide reliable communications links in the most extreme environments.”
