Jun 20 2013
How do you move a 50-foot-wide, circular electromagnet from Long Island to the Chicago suburbs in one piece without flexing or twisting it? Very, very carefully.
On Saturday, June 22, the electromagnet will begin its 3,200-mile land and sea voyage to its new home at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, where it will become the centerpiece of a new experiment called Muon g-2 (pronounced gee-minus-two).
Historic g-2 Experiment Moving to Fermilab
This experiment will study the properties of muons, subatomic particles that live only 2.2 millionths of a second, and its results could open the door to new realms of particle physics.
The magnet was built at the DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York in the 1990s, where it was used in a similar experiment. The ring is constructed of aluminum and steel, with superconducting coils inside, and it cannot be taken apart or twisted more than a few millimeters without irreparably damaging those coils.
Transporting the electromagnet from Brookhaven to Fermilab will cost 10 times less than building a new one. The magnet will remain inert, exhibiting no magnetic properties, until it is plugged in at Fermilab.
The Muon g-2 team has devised a plan that involves loading the ring onto a specially prepared barge and bringing it down the East Coast, around the tip of Florida and up the Mississippi, Illinois, and Des Plaines rivers to Illinois. Once it arrives in late July, the ring will be attached to a truck built just for the move and driven to Fermilab, traveling over two consecutive nights and using rolling roadblocks to temporarily close sections of the roads.
Source: http://www.bnl.gov