The foretoken on that truck is state the blazingly obvious as it perpetrate the 50 - substructure long Muon g-2 electromagnet along its convoluted journeying from Long Island to Chicago . Once installed at Fermilab , the gimmick will aid scientists valuate the internal magnetic workings of the mysterious muon particle .
mu-meson are subatomic particles that have a preposterously short life , living for about two - millionth of a second . But the $ 30 million Muon g-2 halo can capture and store these muons , allow scientist to measure its charismatic wobble to a precision of one part in 10 million . And if that wobble differs from theoretical predictions , it could hint at the cosmos of unexplored particles .
And in fact , earliest experiments have suggested that this is the shell . By moving the twist to Fermilab , particle physicists hope to further their experiments by taking advantage of Fermilab ’s ranking equipment .
This 3,200 - mile nation and sea journey took years to plan , and is a collaboration between two home laboratories , Brookhaven and Fermilab .
The Guardianexplains the significance of the Muon g-2 and why it had to be move :
Amazingly this unique apparatus was reconstruct in the 1990s at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in the contour of a 15 meter diameter annulus of superconducting attraction and when it was used to measure the muon ’s charismatic fundamental interaction there was a surprisal : it differed from the anticipation by almost 4 stock deviations . Not enough to claim a breakthrough but enough to produce some excitement and over 2,000 publishing have referencedthis 2004 resultand those introduce it , offering a plethora of explanations wander from the mundane to the flakey .
Many expected the LHC to see a host of new particles and so this measurement that differ from expectations was sadly left at the communion table . But with the LHC so far only run across a Higgs boson and nothing anomalous there is a renewed interest in repeating this measuring with a greater preciseness to determine uniquely whether the muon ’s magnetised interaction really are showing grounds for new cathartic .
Thanks to accelerator improvement at Fermilab it ’s now possible to repeat this measurement with many more muons than was potential at Brookhaven and with a better control of the systematic uncertainties . The only obstacle is the slight thing of moving the magnet 900 mile from Long Island to Chicago . The attraction has to be move in one piece since break it up would destroy the uniformity of the magnetic field that is needed for the measurement and it has to be send without the halo twisting more than 3 mm . This is attain by case the annulus in glorified cling - picture show on a special hydraulicly point lagger and employ a truck , lighter and a thrifty driver .
The journeying , which start out on June 22nd , is expected to take five week ( see therealtime map ) . The first data point is not expected until 2016 .
This TV shows day three , when the closed chain was lifted from the truck onto a waiting barge at the Smith Point Marina on Long Island , NY .
image : Andre Salles , Fermilab ; FNAL / BNL .
Particle physicsPhysics
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