TOPIC:Accelerators The disconnection of the LHC has begun Work has begun to disconnect the focusing magnets on either side of the ATLAS and CMS experiments, a key step on the road to the HiLumi LHC Written by: Anaïs Schaeffer — 17 September, 2026 CERN Director-General, Mark Thomson, visited the LHC tunnel to mark the start of the dismantling of the accelerator sections that will be replaced by the new HiLumi LHC components. (Image: CERN) The 27 km circumference of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) contains thousands of magnets of different types – dipoles, quadrupoles, sextupoles, octupoles, decapoles, etc. – which each play a very specific role. Among them are the inner triplets: sets of thre...