Giant Particle Storage Ring to Stop in Lemont on Journey to Fermilab

The 50-foot-wide electromagnet will travel 3,200 miles by boat and barge this summer to be part of a new experiment that will study particle physics.

Giant Particle Storage Ring to Stop in Lemont on Journey to Fermilab

The 50-foot-wide electromagnet will travel 3,200 miles by boat and barge this summer to be part of a new experiment that will study particle physics.

A particle storage ring spanning 50 feet in diameter will make a stop in Lemont this summer during a 3,200-mile journey from New York to Illinois. The giant electromagnet is headed to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, just outside Batavia, where it will be used in an experiment called Muon g-2, and will study the properties of muons, tiny subatomic particles that exist for only 2.2 millionths of a second. The ring, made of steel and aluminum, is part of a machine built at New York's Brookhaven National Laboratory in the 1990s. Although most of the machine can be disassembled and brought to Fermilab in trucks, the massive electromagnet must be transported in one piece, and cannot tilt or twist more than a few degrees without being …

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Argonne Scientists Help Launch MAGIC Climate Study

Climate instruments mounted aboard the Horizon Spirit container ship have begun gathering data in yearlong study at sea.

Editor’s note: This summer, I spent some time with Argonne National Laboratory scientists and technicians, who were busy equipping mini-laboratories designed to gather and measure the properties of clouds, precipitation, aerosols and radiation – all from the deck of a cargo ship. On the outside, the labs may look similar to the other shipping containers they will accompany on the Los Angeles-to-Honolulu trips. But rather than being filled with automobiles and appliances, the “cargo” in the containers retrofitted by scientists at Argonne includes aerosol spectrometers (of the ultra-high sensitivity type), hygroscopic tandem differential mobility analyzers and numerous other data-gathering instruments. The sensitive instruments will gather …

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