The commissioning of the instrumentation for the LHC tunnel cryogenics

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is a superconducting accelerator and proton-proton collider of circumference of 27 km, lying about 100 m underground. Its operation relies on 1232 superconducting dipoles with a field of 8.3 T and 392 superconducting quadrupoles with a field gradient of 223 T/m powered at 11.8 kA and operating in superfluid helium at 1.9 K. This paper describes the cryogenic instrumentation commissioning, the challenges and the project organization based on our 2.5 years experience