The LSC Tunnel
from The Last Tomorrow

The LSC is housed underground. The two 5-kilometer long tunnels must meet at a slight angle, and I chose to have them meet approaching vertically at the center. Since the large detector, Hawking's Egg, is 50 feet underground, the ends of the tunnel (where the nuclei are injected) are 500 feet below ground. Note this is not as deep as portions of the LHC.

The end chambers contain ordinary cyclotrons that inject completely ionized nuclei into the main accelerator. Five kilometers later, the beams collide in the large chamber called Central, where the collisions occur and huge detectors are housed. Note that there are other experiments done with the portions of the beams that do not collide, but these aren't described in the story.

The LSC tunnel is a tube 8 meters in diameter. Each accelerator consists of a thousand 1x2.5x5 meter "slices" lined up in the center of the tunnel. There is a tram running around the outside wall of the tunnel to provide transportation for people and equipment.

Every two-hundred meters, a short side tunnel leads to an air shaft/emergency exit and a break room which doubles as a radiation shelter during operation of the accelerator. It seems that even if everything goes right, the laser wakefield accelerators produce copious x-rays, and if the beam wanders lethal levels of hard radiation are produced. So all workers must stay in a break room shelter during tests.

The tram consists of 3 two-meter sections (each of which seat 6), spaced every 200 meters. They start and stop synchronously and take 40 seconds per break room (includes 15 seconds stopped for debarking / embarking). The full loop takes 67 minutes (just over 3 minutes per kilometer). The bench seat opens revealing storage space beneath. When your brother-in-law is an engineer who designs and builds structures like this, the mostly invisible details are done right, such as adequate cooling water, air flow, electric power, space for break rooms, bathrooms, sump pumps, etc. Thanks, Jack, for the plan diagrams.

LSC COMPLEX PLAN VIEW

There's not much visible when properly scaled - it's 10,000 meters long but only 8 wide. Even the cluster of buildings above Central would fit into a few football fields of space, and a football field is only 1% of the length of the facility. Each equals sign below represents a 200 meter section of the tunnel, should only be a half-pixel high, and would have a pixel-sized break room at one end. The O's representing Central and the North and South ends are too large by a factor of four.

O=========================O=========================O

TUNNEL CROSS-SECTION

TUNNEL SECTION / BREAK ROOM PLAN VIEW

CENTRAL PLAN VIEW

NORTH END PLAN VIEW

The LSC Tunnel from The Last Tomorrow

The LSC Tunnel
from The Last Tomorrow