RFS Blog Connecting Discovery: Delivering Wireless Coverage in the World’s Biggest Scientific Research Centers

CERN, DESY, ESRF, and Helmholtz Centers GSI and Jülich are the biggest research centers for particle physics and applied science in Europe. Particle accelerators, storage rings, and synchrotrons are built at the limits of technical feasibility and are among the largest and most complicated instruments known to mankind. From the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to GSI’s work in nuclear physics, which has paved the way for ion beam cancer therapy, these institutions are at the forefront of scientific discovery. 

They are home to hundreds of millions of Euros of research equipment, famously, some of the largest particle accelerators in the world, but how is it connected?

Connecting Scientific Equipment

It is easy to take for granted the idea that just because the equipment is generating billions of valuable data points, there is connectivity. 

In reality, particle accelerators and ring structures have several significant challenges that make installing the connectivity required for both research and safety complex. Firstly, their location in tunnel-like underground environments with a large amount of metal, pipes, cables, bending magnets, cooling, ultra-high vacuum equipment, beam diagnostics, etc, is incredibly ‘wireless unfriendly’. Each of these components alone blocks and impacts the performance of wireless connectivity. Add to this that as some of the largest of their kind, the particle accelerators at research centers in Europe are significant in size, and it is clear that designing and installing a communication system to work around these factors is challenging.