A 15-ton electromagnet is being moved from Long Island to Chicago, beginning June 22. The journey is expected to take a month. The 50-foot wide magnet is currently housed at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in eastern Long Island. It is being moved to the Fermi National Accelerator, run by the Department of Energy.
Once in Illinois, the magnet will become part of the Muon g-2 experiment, designed to explore the behavior of muons - subatomic particles that only exist for 2.2 millionths of a second.
"When we first started thinking about this, we all thought it wouldn't be possible. But if you have a big problem, you find good people who can fix the problem. That's physics," Bill Morse, a physicist at Brookhaven National Lab, said.
When it was first constructed in the 1990's, the electromagnet was the largest one in the world. It is made from steel and aluminum and has superconducting coils inside the device. With scientists at Brookhaven no longer needing the giant magnet, it is being re-assigned to the Muon g-2 program. It is hoped that the device will help uncover some of the unknown properties of these short-lived particles.
Moving the magnet from Long Island to Illinois will cost around three million dollars, but that is just one-tenth the cost of constructing a brand-new magnet that would perform the necessary duties needed for the investigations of muons planned at Brookhaven.
The giant magnet cannot be disassembled for travel, and any twist in the structure larger than 1/8 inch would break the coils inside, which cannot be repaired. To protect the instrument, a truck and barge have each been modified to safely transport the device.
The journey from Upton, Long Island to just outside Batavia, Ilinois (a suberb of Chicago) is normally 900 miles by car. But, after a two-day journey from Brookhaven to Smith Point Park on the Atlantic, the electromagnet will be loaded on a barge, sent down around the tip of Florida, and then travel up the Mississippi River. After ending its trip by traveling up the Illinois and Des Plaines Rivers, the total journey by this circuitous route will total 3,200 miles.
"We're excited to get this move underway. It's not often our neighbors get a ringside seat for something this complex and interesting." Chris Polly, manager of the Muon g-2 project at Fermilab, said.
