North Area – Ready for Consolidation

5 DECEMBER,2020 | By Markus Brugger

Following yesterdays’ EAR project, what could be a better transition than the North Area Consolidation (NA-CONS)? Over the past years several respective high priority consolidation activities (focusing on safety and critical services) were already successfully launched and implemented in the North FT Areas and continued being so during LS2. In parallel our NA-CONS study team prepared a detailed analysis of the required mid/long-term NA consolidation needs. Conducted in an effective manner, the study distinguished between safety related, availability constrained, and physics driven criteria, giving rise to two mitigation strategies presented to CERN’s management. The second strategy (efficiency, flexibility and physics driven) was selected as baseline early this year and the team is now getting ready for the Cost & Schedule Review in early 2021, aiming for approval and allowing to initiate the final NA-CONS project to be implemented in two phases over the next 10 years. Visiting the North Area (such as building 887, the largest of CERN’s experiment halls), is always an astonishing experience, getting your way through (and above) hundreds of concrete blocks, surrounded by experiments and user areas and enormous gantry cranes flying on top of you. Between the blocks, or from the passerelle, you glimpse detector components, a long-term experiment, or beamlines carrying their particles to their destination. Beyond LS2, the North Area is looking to the future with the Physics Beyond Colliders program where several experiments propose to use the SPS secondary beam lines. Many related implementation studies were finalized in our group, now getting ready for a test area on the muon beamline of EHN2, as well as several other experiments or projects, such as NA64 , MuonE and AMBER, as well as NA60+, NA62+ or KLEVER. The latter experiments and details hiding behind their acronyms is certainly worth a dedicated chapter in our advent calendar, thus let me finish in congratulating the NA-CONS study team for their excellent work, achieving in 2020 the important milestone of ‘ready for approval’.