A hundred kilometers from Moscow, in the forests, a treasure is literally buried underground. We're not talking about chests of gold and precious stones. A real hadron collider rests near Moscow at a depth of 60 meters.
This project was supposed to be the pinnacle of the scientific revolution of the 80s. The small scientific town of Protvino, located next to the collider, would become the center of gravity of world science. However, the particle accelerator was never launched.
Why was the construction of the world's largest hadron collider stopped and the project frozen? Faktrum collected the most interesting facts about the Soviet particle accelerator.
The largest collider in Russia and in the world
The fate of the Soviet collider is complicated. They either began to actively build it, or almost completely abandoned it. The deepest tunnels of the accelerator are 60 meters away from the surface. In terms of total length, the collider is not inferior to the ring line of the Moscow metro. And this whole huge colossus, hidden in the forests of the Moscow region, is not finished.
The city of Protvino itself appeared in 1965. Before this, the closed scientific village of Serpukhov-7 existed in its place. Scientists who lived in a closed city worked at the then operating proton synchrotron. This accelerator, as planned by scientists, was supposed to become part of a huge Soviet collider. The location for the construction of the synchrotron and collider was not chosen by chance. This part of the Moscow region used to be the bottom of the sea, which made the soil inaccessible to seismic shocks.
Hadron Collider in the USSR: ups and downs
In the early eighties, when the project was given the go-ahead, there were no analogues in the world. The powers of the American Tevatron and the Swiss supercollider were significantly lower. In 1983, the first vertical shafts for tunnel drilling appeared. However, drilling into hard rock is a thankless task. The work proceeded sluggishly; over the course of several years, the machines “gnawed through” only one and a half kilometers of rock. In 1988, the USSR allocated additional funds for the purchase of foreign drilling rigs. The machines not only created tunnels, but also lined the bottom with concrete “pillows” with metal insulation. The work has accelerated.
Construction of one of the collider tunnels In 1988, the main ring tunnel was 70% ready, the injection channel (for transferring accelerated particles from the synchrotron to the collider) was 95%. More than 20 special sites for the placement of utilities have grown on the ground. It would seem that there was only one last push left before a bright future. But funding stopped again. In 1991, the project budget was cut, and during the crisis in 1998, the money almost dried up. Simply abandoning an unfinished facility would mean dooming the Moscow region to an environmental disaster. Conservation has begun.
The remaining third of the tunnel took four years to build. However, it was impossible to start the collider after this. The tunnels did not have enough magnetic “lining”, which creates a field and accelerates particles. In this case, the injection channel was completely completed. In addition, the construction of engineering halls and the installation of a neutrino telescope on Lake Baikal, which was supposed to “catch” particles, were completed.
The inglorious end of an abandoned particle accelerator
Today millions are spent on maintaining the Soviet collider. Every year it is necessary to pump out water from the tunnels, strengthen the walls and concrete the stalker passages. The Large Hadron Collider, which was launched in 2008, put an end to the idea of reviving the Russian accelerator. Moreover, in Russia, construction is already underway on a more modern (albeit smaller) NIKA collider in Dubna, Moscow Region.
The tunnels in their current state It is extremely expensive to maintain the Soviet collider idle. Because of this, ideas for renovation of the project are being actively considered. The most promising direction is the creation of a huge storage battery based on the accelerator. Such a “battery” will relieve the load on Moscow’s electrical networks. But all ideas require considerable funding, which is a stumbling block. Even just filling the Soviet collider with concrete is an expensive proposition.
With the help of this scientific miracle, scientists were going to create an electromagnetic voltage three times higher than the energy of the Fermilab accelerator in the USA, which at that time was considered the most powerful in the world. After the collapse of the USSR, funding stopped. But last year they decided to revive the project.
Tunnel 21 kilometers long
In the city of nuclear scientists Protvino, on the 97th kilometer of the Simferopol highway, at a depth of 60 meters from the surface of the earth, there is an abandoned tunnel. This is not a UFO base, as curious guests suggest, but an abandoned particle accelerator. The entrance to the tunnel is covered with iron sheets, but this is not a hindrance for adventure lovers. They tear off the sheets, enter the tunnel, photograph the rust and mold-covered shafts, and even throw parties there. But very soon the chrome in the tunnel will again sparkle and the walls will be illuminated with light: the Russian government has decided to bring the Soviet brainchild back to life.
The Soviet collider is now called the “younger brother” of the European one, although it would be more correct to call it “elder.” After all, the LHC is almost 20 years younger. And it is not much larger in size: the length of the tunnel of the European collider is 27 kilometers, and the Soviet one is 21. Of course, in 1983, when the construction of the proton-proton UNK (accelerator-storage complex) began in Protvino near Moscow, no one in the world knew about it I had no idea, because the project was classified. At a depth of 60 meters under the Simferopol highway, drilling machines were digging a tunnel the height of a three-story building. By the mid-90s, the construction of the main tunnel was completed; all that remained was to install the equipment. But due to the fact that the money allocated under the USSR ran out and new ones did not arrive, the project had to be closed in 1998.
Nikolai Tyurin, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics of the State Scientific Center of the Russian Federation:
- It is impossible to completely revive the Soviet collider, but we want to start by placing a giant battery in an underground ring tunnel that would help support the overloaded Moscow electrical grid.
Perhaps scientists are being modest by not talking about the true purpose of resuming construction of the collider. After all, there are so many rumors surrounding the CERN accelerator that it is difficult not to take them into account. It’s not for nothing that they say that there is no smoke without fire...
Will the quantum leap become a reality?
According to some reports, CERN pumped about seven billion US dollars into the creation of the Large Hadron Collider. Currently, it is planned to build two more similar accelerators with a total cost of 10 billion. At the same time, scientists cannot yet boast of tangible results. Information appeared on the Internet, allegedly disseminated by the head of one of the research centers, about the true purpose of the collider. According to him, during tests in August 2008, when particles collided, some of them disappeared and appeared in another place. The scientist writes incognito that this became proof of the existence of the theory of Supersymmetry, which is what the project leaders sought. In other words, we are talking about the implementation of the principle of teleportation. By the way, quantum theory was developed back in 1925 by Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. It was they who questioned Newton's postulates that objects do not suddenly disappear and reappear somewhere else. They discovered that an electron inside an atom can make quantum leaps. And recently, American physicist Mark Risen experimentally recorded the instantaneous speed of a Brownian particle.
Nikolay Kravtsov, expert economist, Simferopol:
- If during the Cold War scientific discoveries were the result of an arms race, now it would be foolish to assume that countries are spending billions of dollars in order to unravel the mysteries of the Universe and understand the meaning of life. Everything that is done is done for commercial gain. Therefore, the statements of scientists that their task is to understand how the Universe was formed, I think, sound ridiculous. Maybe they want this, but investors probably have a more mundane interest in the project.
If we assume that the collider is a tool for creating a teleport, or perhaps the teleport itself, then the colossal costs are quite justified. One can only imagine how the future will change if we stop needing transport, and in a matter of seconds we can move from Simferopol, for example, to New York. For politicians and businessmen who spend half a day just on flights, this would be like a breath of fresh air. But if teleportation becomes a reality, this does not mean at all that cars, trains, planes, and ships will disappear. After all, every service has its own client. We have not completely abandoned postal services. Although we use e-mail everywhere for correspondence. The Internet has not destroyed newspapers, radio and television. Although news appears much faster in it, and you can download all the episodes of your favorite series...
So far, any such assumptions make the “experts” smile. Although Einstein was once considered crazy...
Denis SIMONENKO Crimean Telegraph
photo: CT Archive
material published in "KT" No. 112
In the early 80s of the last century, we didn’t even know the word “collider”, and the city of Protvino was just a village in the Serpukhov district, Moscow region. At the same time, at the level of the CPSU Central Committee, a decision was made to build on the basis of the Serpukhov (later Protvinsky) synchrophasotron, to expand the scientific and technical base of the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) located there.
By 1993, underground work was almost completed for the first stage of launching the Acceleration Storage Complex (UNC). In total, about 50 kilometers of mine workings of various diameters were passed, about 30 shafts were built, and installation of communications and UNK equipment began in finished underground workings. At the same time, more than 20 industrial sites with multi-story production buildings were capitally equipped on the surface, to which water supply, heating, compressed air routes, high-voltage power lines were laid, previously ordered unique equipment began to arrive...
The democratic transformations taking place in the USSR at that time certainly played a positive role in the construction of the UNK. The destruction of the “Iron Curtain” made it possible to purchase modern mining and tunneling equipment abroad, and for our specialists to train there to work on it. During the construction of the shafts, the technology used in the construction of missile shafts was used, which was previously absolutely secret. But the subsequent collapse of the USSR began, and then Russia’s transition to a market economy “completed” the construction of the UNK. There was simply no one to finance the construction. In those days of global change there was no time for science...
At present, almost all surface structures have been destroyed; funding is provided only for the maintenance and protection of underground mines - their destruction can lead to an environmental disaster.
If you type the phrase “Unusual places in the Moscow region” into a search engine, one of the links will take you to the page “Abandoned Tunnel of Secret Physicists.” Brief description: Simferopol highway, 97 km, Protvino. An unfinished particle accelerator - the so-called hadron collider.
In 1983, on the border of the Moscow and Kaluga regions in the city of Protvino, work began on creating an accelerator.
The length of the tunnel is 21 km, the diameter is 5.5 meters, like in the metro. Depth - from 20 to 60 meters. The similarity with the metro is complemented by the fact that approximately every one and a half kilometers the accelerator ring tunnel is adjacent to underground halls for housing large-sized equipment (“stations”). These halls are connected to the surface by vertical shafts for wiring communications, transporting equipment, etc.
In 1994, the first section was put into operation - an underground channel 2.7 km long, connecting the old U-70 and the new UNK (acceleration and storage complex). The old accelerator served as the first accelerating stage for a super-powerful collider. Electromagnetic and vacuum systems and beam monitoring equipment were installed in the channel. After setting up all elements of the channel, protons with an energy of 70 GeV flew along the designed trajectory up to the future entry point into the UNK underground ring. After the completion of the main tunnel, work on the creation of the accelerator complex was completely stopped due to lack of funds...
The roads leave much to be desired - almost all of them are made of unevenly joined concrete slabs and look like this:
The so-called “UNK site”, the entrance to the territory of which is blocked by a rusty barrier:
The tunnel is not abandoned. In some places the tunnel is flooded, but the water is no more than 20-30cm. Water is pumped out around the clock. Construction work is underway in the tunnel (filling the floor with concrete in the unfinished part of the tunnel), there is lighting and ventilation. There is a narrow gauge railway and an electric locomotive. To maintain the tunnel in safety, 20 million rubles are allocated annually for repair work, because its destruction can lead to an environmental disaster. Official permission to descend into the “rings” can be obtained from the management (which is located at the UNK site described above) on weekdays and will descend together with the workers at the neighboring mine.
Source - Photo (c) svetulik2004
But it turns out that a hundred kilometers from Moscow, near the science city of Protvino, in the forests of the Moscow region, a treasure worth tens of billions of rubles is buried. It cannot be dug up and stolen—hidden forever in the ground, it is valuable only for the history of science. We are talking about the accelerator-storage complex (ASC) of the Protvino Institute of High Energy Physics - a mothballed underground facility almost the size of the Large Hadron Collider.
The length of the underground accelerator ring is 21 km. The main tunnel with a diameter of 5 meters is laid at a depth of 20 to 60 meters (depending on the terrain). In addition, many auxiliary rooms were built, connected to the surface by vertical shafts. If the proton collider in Protvino had been completed on time before the LHC, a new point of attraction would have appeared in the world of fundamental physics.
The biggest project
Protvino from a height of 325 meters
To paraphrase the joke “I told you – this place is damned!” we can say that colliders do not appear out of nowhere - there must be suitable conditions. Many years before the strategic decision was made to build the largest scientific facility in the USSR, in 1960, the secret village of Serpukhov-7 was founded as a base for the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP). The location was chosen for geological reasons - in this part of the Moscow region, the soil, which is the bottom of an ancient sea, allows the placement of large underground objects protected from seismic activity.
In 1965, it received the status of an urban-type settlement and a new name - Protvino - derived from the name of the local river Protva. In 1967, the largest accelerator of its time was launched in Protvino - the U-70 proton synchrotron with an energy of 70 GeV (10 9 electron volts). It is still in operation and remains the highest energy accelerator in Russia.
Construction of U-70
Soon they began to develop a project for a new accelerator - a proton-proton collider with an energy of 3 TeV (10 12 eV), which would become the most powerful in the world. Work on the theoretical substantiation of the UNK was led by Academician Anatoly Logunov, a theoretical physicist and scientific director of the Institute of High Energy Physics. The U-70 synchrotron was planned to be used as the first “acceleration stage” for the UNK accelerator.
The UNK project envisaged two stages: one was supposed to receive a beam of protons with an energy of 70 GeV from U-70 and raise it to an intermediate value of 400-600 GeV. In the second ring (second stage), the proton energy would rise to its maximum value. Both stages of the UNK were to be located in one circular tunnel larger in size than the ring line of the Moscow Metro. The similarity with the metro is added by the fact that the construction was carried out by metro builders from Moscow and Almaty.
Experimental plan
1. Accelerator U-70. 2. Injection channel—introducing a proton beam into the UNK accelerator ring. 3. Antiproton channel. 4. Cryogenic housing. 5. Tunnels to the hadron and neutron complexes
In the early eighties, there were no accelerators comparable in size and energy in the world. Neither the Tevatron in the USA (ring length 6.4 km, energy in the early 1980s - 500 GeV), nor the Super Collider of the CERN laboratory (ring length 6.9 km, collision energy 400 GeV) could provide physics with the necessary tools for conducting new experiments .
Our country had extensive experience in the development and construction of accelerators. Built in Dubna in 1956, the synchrophasotron became the most powerful in the world at that time: energy 10 GeV, length about 200 meters. At the U-70 synchrotron built in Protvino, physicists made several discoveries: they detected antimatter nuclei for the first time, discovered the so-called “Serpukhov effect” - an increase in the total cross sections of hadronic interactions (values that determine the course of the reaction of two colliding particles) and much more.
Ten years of work
Full-scale model of the UNK tunnel
In 1983, construction work on the site began using the mining method, using 26 vertical shafts.
For several years, construction was carried out at a sluggish pace - only one and a half kilometers were covered. In 1987, a government decree was issued to intensify work, and in 1988, for the first time since 1935, the Soviet Union purchased abroad two modern tunnel-boring complexes from the Lovat company, with the help of which Protontonnelstroy began laying tunnels.
Why did you need to buy a tunnel shield if the country had been successfully building a subway for fifty years before? The fact is that 150-ton Lovat machines not only drilled with a very high penetration accuracy of up to 2.5 centimeters, but also lined the tunnel arch with a 30-centimeter layer of concrete with metal insulation (ordinary concrete blocks, with a sheet of metal insulation welded on the inside) . Much later, in the Moscow Metro, blocks with metal insulation will be used to make a small section on the Trubnaya - Sretensky Boulevard section.
Injection channel. Rails for an electric locomotive are recessed into the concrete floor
At the end of 1989, about 70% of the main ring tunnel and 95% of the injection channel were completed - a tunnel more than 2.5 km long, designed to transfer the beam from the U-70 to the UNK. We built three buildings (out of a planned 12) for engineering support, and began the construction of ground-based facilities along the entire perimeter: more than 20 industrial sites with multi-story production buildings, to which water supply, heating, compressed air, and high-voltage power lines were laid.
During the same period, the project began to have problems with financing. In 1991, with the collapse of the USSR, the UNK could have been abandoned immediately, but the cost of conserving the unfinished tunnel would have been too high. Destroyed and flooded with groundwater, it could pose a danger to the ecology of the entire region.
It took another four years to close the underground ring of the tunnel, but the accelerator part was hopelessly behind - in total, only about ¾ of the accelerating structure for the first stage of the UNK was manufactured, and only a few dozen magnets of the superconducting structure (and 2500 were required, each of them weighing about 10 tons) .
Magnet test bench
Here's a walk through this facility with a blogger samnamos (link to original post)
1. We will begin our walk from the area where the shield penetration was carried out as the last thing.
2. There is a lot of dirt here, and in some places there are fairly flooded places.
3. Branch to the trunk
6. Mine cage
7. In some places there are breakdowns with closed emergency workings
9. Equipment room
17. Neptune - "The largest hall in the system."
19. This is the southern part of the large ring. The tunnel here is almost completely ready - even the inserts for the power inputs have been installed, as well as the racks for the accelerator itself.
20. In the process of photographing.
22. And this hall leads towards the working small ring of the accelerator, where research is already underway, so we will go further in a large circle :)
22. Soon the clear tunnel ended and the last section of excavation began, where the shaft from which we started is located.
23. Depth approximately 60 meters. After spending 19 hours underground, we leave the underground kingdom...
The magnetic system is one of the most important in the accelerator. The higher the energy of the particles, the more difficult it is to send them along a circular path, and, accordingly, the stronger the magnetic fields must be. In addition, the particles need to be focused so that they do not repel each other as they fly. Therefore, along with magnets that turn particles in a circle, focusing magnets are also needed. The maximum energy of accelerators is in principle limited by the size and cost of the magnetic system.
The injection tunnel turned out to be the only part of the complex that was 100% ready. Since the UNK orbital plane is 6 m lower than in the U-70, the channel was equipped with an extended section of magnets, providing a beam rotation of 64°. The ion-optical system ensured coordination of the phase volume of the beam extracted from the U-70 with the structure of the tunnel turns.
At the moment when it became clear that “there is no money and we have to hold on,” all the vacuum equipment for the injection channel, pumping systems, power supply devices, control and monitoring systems were developed and received. A vacuum tube made of stainless steel, the pressure in which is less than 10 -7 mm Hg, is the basis of the accelerator; particles move along it. The total length of the vacuum chambers of the injection channel and two stages of the accelerator, the channels for extracting and discharging the beam of accelerated protons should have been about 70 km.
The construction of a unique neutron complex began - particles dispersed in the UNK would be transported through a separate tunnel into the ground, towards Lake Baikal, at the bottom of which a special detector was installed. The neutrino telescope on Lake Baikal still exists and is located 3.5 km from the shore, at a kilometer depth.
Throughout the entire tunnel, underground halls were built every one and a half kilometers to accommodate large equipment.
In addition to the main tunnel, another technical one was built (pictured above), intended for cables and pipes.
The tunnel had straight sections for placing accelerator technological systems, designated on the diagram as “SPP-1” (a beam of particles from the U-70 enters here) and “SPP-4” (particles are removed from here). They were extended halls with a diameter of up to 9 meters and a length of about 800 meters.
A ventilation shaft 60 m deep (also on the KDPV).
Death and Prospects
The current state of the tunnels, which are still being monitored
In 1994, builders completed the demolition of the last and most difficult section of the 21-kilometer tunnel in terms of hydrogeological conditions (due to groundwater). During the same period, the money practically dried up, because the costs of the project were comparable to the construction of a nuclear power plant. It became impossible to order equipment or pay wages to workers. The situation was aggravated by the 1998 crisis. After the decision was made to participate in the launch of the Large Hadron Collider, the completion of the UNC was finally abandoned.
The LHC, commissioned in 2008, turned out to be more modern and more powerful, finally killing the idea of reviving the Russian collider. However, it is impossible to simply abandon the gigantic complex, and now it is a “suitcase without a handle.” Every year, money is spent from the federal budget on maintaining security and pumping water from the tunnels. Funds are also spent on concreting numerous halls that attract lovers of industrial exoticism from all over Russia.
Over the past ten years, various ideas for renovation of the complex have been proposed. A superconducting induction storage device could be placed in the tunnel, which would help maintain the stability of the power grid throughout the Moscow region. Or they could make a mushroom farm there. There are many ideas, but they all come down to a lack of money - even burying the complex and completely filling it with concrete is too expensive. In the meantime, the unclaimed caves of science remain a monument to the unfulfilled dream of Soviet physicists.
The presence of the LHC does not mean the elimination of all other colliders. The U-70 accelerator of the Institute of High Energy Physics remains the largest operating in Russia. The NIKA heavy ion accelerator is being built in Dubna, near Moscow. Its length is relatively small - NIKA will include four 200-meter rings - but the area in which the collider will operate should provide scientists with observation of the “borderline” state, when nuclei and particles released from the nuclei of atoms exist simultaneously. For physics, this area is considered one of the most promising.
Among the fundamental research that will be carried out using the NIKA collider is modeling a microscopic model of the early Universe. Scientists intend to use the collider to search for new methods of treating cancer (irradiating a tumor with a beam of particles). In addition, the installation is used
