“At the moment, CERN is in a winter shutdown phase and most experiments are undergoing maintenance and upgrades ready for spring time when things start up again. In the high energy part of the facility, where the radioactive isotopes are accelerated up to 10% of the speed of light, the ISOLDE Solenoidal Spectrometer is having crucial work done to its superconducting magnet.

“The magnet is the heart of a former hospital MRI scanner from Australia, which was purchased by the University of Liverpool and shipped to CERN in 2016 when it became obsolete as a medical device. These magnets are being cooled with liquid helium and a cryogenics system is running 24/7 to keep the magnet cold and prevent the helium from boiling off.

Every 3 years or so, this needs to be serviced to keep running it at maximum efficiency, but this time things didn’t go to plan… things got worse instead of better! Patrick has been working with engineers from Germany to fix the problem and we hope it’s fully functional again in time for experiments later in the year. 

“Another experiment getting improvements this winter is the ISOLDE Decay Station. Engineers at the University of York have constructed a new support structure to mount the radiation detectors in a flexible geometry.

This will allow different configurations of the detector setup to be used to either maximise efficiency or combine detector types. Chris is helping to install and test the mechanics, which will need to be aligned to sub-millimetre precision before experiments begin.”