But it turns out, a hundred kilometers from Moscow, near the science town of Protvino, in the forests of the Moscow Region, a treasure of tens of billions of rubles was buried. You cannot dig it up and steal it - forever hidden in the ground, it carries value only for the history of science. We are talking about the accelerator-storage complex (UNK) of the Protvino Institute for High Energy Physics - a mothballed underground object almost the size of the Large Hadron Collider.
The length of the underground ring of the accelerator 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 ancillary rooms were built, connected to the surface by vertical shafts. If the Proton Collider in Protvino had been delivered on time before the LHC, a new point of attraction would have appeared in the world of fundamental physics.
Further - about the history of the main Soviet collider, on which the physics of the future could be forged.
The biggest project
To paraphrase the joke "And I told you - the place is damned!" we can say that colliders do not appear from scratch - there must be suitable conditions. Many years before the strategic decision to build the largest scientific facility in the USSR was made, in 1960, the secret village of Serpukhov-7 was founded as a base for the Institute for High Energy Physics (IHEP). The site was chosen for geological reasons - in this part of the Moscow region, the soil, which is the bottom of the ancient sea, allows the placement of large underground objects protected from seismic activity.
Protvino from a height of 325 meters:
Promotional video:
In 1965, the status of an urban-type settlement was obtained and a new name - Protvino - derived from the name of the local rivulet Protva. In 1967, the largest accelerator of its time was launched in Protvino - the 70 GeV (109 electron-volt) proton synchrotron U-70. It is still in operation and remains the most high-energy accelerator in Russia.
Construction of the U-70.
Soon they began to develop a project for a new accelerator - a proton-proton collider with an energy of 3 TeV (1012 eV), which would become the most powerful in the world. The work on the theoretical substantiation of the UNC was headed by Academician Anatoly Logunov, a theoretical physicist, scientific director of the Institute for High Energy Physics. It was planned to use the U-70 synchrotron as the first "booster stage" for the UNK accelerator.
In the UNK project, two stages were supposed: one was to receive a proton beam with an energy of 70 GeV from the 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 steps of the UNK were to be located in one ring tunnel with dimensions larger than the ring line of the Moscow metro. The similarities with the metro are added by the fact that the construction was carried out by the metro builders of Moscow and Alma-Ata.
Experiment plan
1. Accelerator U-70. 2. Channel of injection - injecting a proton beam into the ring of the UNK accelerator. 3. Channel of antiprotons. 4. Cryogenic body. 5. Tunnels to the hadron and neutron complexes.
In the early eighties, there were no accelerators of comparable size and energy in the world. Neither the Tevatron in the United States (ring length 6.4 km, energy in the early 1980s - 500 GeV), nor the Supercollider of the CERN laboratory (ring length 6.9 km, collision energy 400 GeV) could provide physics with the necessary tools to conduct new experiments …
Our country had extensive experience in the development and construction of accelerators. The synchrophasotron, built in Dubna in 1956, became the most powerful in the world at that time: energy 10 GeV, length about 200 meters. Physicists made several discoveries at the U-70 synchrotron built in Protvino: they first registered antimatter nuclei, discovered the so-called "Serpukhov effect" - an increase in the total cross sections of hadronic interactions (quantities that determine the course of the reaction of two colliding particles) and much more.
Ten year work
In 1983, construction work began on the site using a mining method using 26 vertical shafts.
Full-scale model of the UNK tunnel.
For several years, construction was carried out in a sluggish mode - only one and a half kilometers were covered. In 1987, a government decree was issued on the intensification of work, and in 1988, for the first time since 1935, the Soviet Union purchased two modern Lovat tunnel boring complexes abroad, with the help of which Protontonnelstroy began to build tunnels.
Why did you need to buy a tunnel shield, if before that fifty years in the country successfully built the metro? The fact is that the 150-ton Lovat machines not only drilled with a very high penetration accuracy of up to 2.5 centimeters, but also lined the roof of the tunnel with a 30-centimeter layer of concrete with metal insulation (ordinary concrete blocks, with a sheet of metal insulation welded from the inside) … Much later, in the Moscow metro, a small section on the Trubnaya-Sretensky Boulevard section will be made of blocks with metal insulation.
Injection channel. Rails for an electric locomotive are sunk into the concrete floor.
At the end of 1989, about 70% of the main ring tunnel and 95% of the injection channel, a tunnel with a length of more than 2.5 km, was passed, designed to transfer the beam from the U-70 to the UNK. We have built three buildings (out of the planned 12) for engineering support, launched the construction of ground facilities around the entire perimeter: more than 20 industrial sites with multi-storey industrial buildings, to which water supply, heating, compressed air routes were laid, high-voltage power lines.
During the same period, the project started having funding problems. In 1991, with the collapse of the USSR, the UNK could have been abandoned immediately, but the cost of preserving the unfinished tunnel would have been too high. Destroyed, flooded with groundwater, it could pose a threat to the ecology of the entire region.
It took another four years to close the underground ring of the tunnel, but the accelerating part was hopelessly behind - only about ¾ of the accelerating structure for the first stage of the UNK was made, and only a few dozen magnets of a superconducting structure (and 2500 were required, each of them weighing about 10 tons) …
Stand for testing magnets.
Here's a walk through this property with blogger samnamos:
We will start our walk from the site where the shield tunnel was carried out in the last turn.
There is a lot of mud here, in some places there are fairly flooded places.
Branch to the trunk.
Mine cage.
In some places there are crossovers with closed emergency workings.
Equipment room.
Tubing stacker.
And then the rails are embedded in concrete.
Neptune - "The largest hall with the system."
This is the southern part of the great ring. The tunnel here is almost completely ready - even embedded inserts for power inputs, as well as racks for the accelerator itself, have been installed.
In the process of taking pictures.
And this hall leads towards the working small ring of the accelerator, where research is already underway, so we will go further along the big circle.
Soon the clean tunnel ended and the last section of the tunnel went, where the mine is located, from which we started.
The depth is about 60 meters. After spending 19 hours underground, we leave the underworld …
The magnetic system is one of the most important in an 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 should be. In addition, the particles need to be focused so that they do not repel each other while they fly. Therefore, along with the magnets that rotate the 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 was the only part of the complex that was 100% complete. Since the plane of the orbit of the UNK is 6 m lower than in the U-70, the channel was equipped with an extended section of magnets that ensured a turn of the beam by 64 °. The ion-optical system matched the phase volume of the beam extracted from the U-70 with the structure of the turns of the tunnel.
At the moment when it became clear that “there is no money and we must 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 of which is less than 10 (to the power of -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 ejecting the beam of accelerated protons should have been about 70 km.
The “Neptune” hall of 15 x 60 m2 was built, where the accelerator targets and control equipment were to be located.
Minor technological tunnels.
The construction of a unique neutron complex has begun - the particles dispersed in the UNK would be discharged into the ground through a separate tunnel, towards Baikal, at the bottom of which a special detector is installed. The neutrino telescope on Lake Baikal still exists and is located 3.5 km from the coast, 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 one was built, a technical one (pictured above), intended for cables and pipes.
The tunnel had rectilinear sections for placing the technological systems of the accelerator, designated on the diagram as "SPP-1" (this is where a beam of particles from a U-70 enters) and "SPP-4" (particles are removed from here). They were extended halls up to 9 meters in diameter and about 800 meters long.
A ventilation shaft with a depth of 60 m (it is also on the KDPV).
Death and prospects
In 1994, the builders assembled the last and most difficult hydrogeological conditions (due to groundwater) section of the 21-kilometer tunnel. During the same period, the money practically dried up, because the costs of the project were commensurate with 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 UNK was finally abandoned.
The current state of the tunnels, which are still being monitored.
The LHC, which was commissioned in 2008, turned out to be more modern and more powerful, finally killing the idea of reanimating the Russian collider. However, it is impossible to just leave the giant complex and now it is a "suitcase without a handle." Every year, money is spent from the federal budget for the maintenance of guards 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 renovating the complex have been proposed. The tunnel could house a superconducting induction storage that would help maintain the stability of the electrical grid of the entire Moscow region. Or a mushroom farm could be made there. There are many ideas, but they all rest against a lack of money - even to bury the complex and fill it completely 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 is still the largest operating in Russia. The heavy ion accelerator NIKA is being built in Dubna near Moscow. Its length is relatively short - NIKA will include four 200-meter rings - however, the area in which the collider will operate should provide scientists with observation of the "boundary" state, when nuclei and particles released from atomic nuclei 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 cancer treatment (irradiation of a tumor with a particle beam). In addition, the installation is used to study the effect of radiation on the operation of electronics. The construction of the new accelerator is planned to be completed in 2023.
But readers immediately noticed that it was in this direction that Greater Moscow expanded:
Although there is still information that somewhere there is an ISF (storage of spent nuclear fuel).