Repurposing the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is mainly used to collide proton beams to search for and study elementary particles such as the Higgs boson. However a portion of its time is spent colliding heavy nuclei to study the collective behaviour of deconfined hadronic matter at extreme energy densities and temperatures, the Quark-Gluon Plasma.

This talk will introduce some of the varied beam physics governing the workings and performance limits of the particle accelerator itself and tell the story of how we made these collisions. There will be special emphasis on the hybrid proton-nucleus collisions, an unexpected and almost unprecedented mode of collider operation which recently yielded the largest jump in collision energy in the history of accelerators.