Giant electromagnet to be moved from New York to Illinois

Quantum Diaries : A 15.24-m-diameter electromagnet built and used in the 1990s at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York is to be moved to Illinois later this year. The ring-shaped electromagnet and other parts of that original experiment will now be used in the Muon g-2 to study the properties of muons. Transporting the large magnet to Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, will cost almost 10 times less than building a new ring from scratch. The ring will sail on a barge down the East Coast, pass around Florida, and then head up the Mississippi River before being transferred to a specially designed flatbed truck for the final drive to Fermilab. The ring itself is used to trap and store muons, which “wobble” when held in a magnetic field. Although the amount of wobble measured in the older experiment did not match scientists’ predictions, Fermilab’s more intense and pure beam of muons may help attain a more definitive measurement.