Giant magnet attracts big attention
Engineers at the CERN lab in Geneva spent nearly 10 hours lowing a 1,920 metric ton magnet over 320 feet into the ground on Wednesday; this move is only a piece of a much larger project that scientists hope will one day uncover some secrets behind our universe.
This giant magnet is an essential component for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scheduled to be active in November, and be 100% functional by 2008.
Similar to the well known, Illinois based, U.S. particle collider at Fermi Lab, the Large Hadron Collider is expected to be the largest and highest energy particle accelerator in existence.
The LHC will use liquid helium cooled superconducting magnets to produce electric fields that will propel particles to near light speeds in a 16.7 mile, 10 foot diameter tunnel that crosses the border between Switzerland and France at four points.
The propulsion of particles will lead to a particle collision that introduces the scattering of many other mysterious subatomic particles. The LHC will use 6 detectors to record the events that happen immediately after collision.
The information gathered from the detectors will be used by nearly 7,000 physicists from 80 countries to either prove or disprove current theories about particles, matter, dark matter, antimatter, gravity, and string theory.
It is with this particle accelerator, the LHC, that researchers at the University of California, Carnegie Mellon University, and The University of Texas will need to challenge string theory, which is arguably the most popular theory in theoretical physics.
The researchers claim the LHC will be the only particle accelerator powerful enough to observe the scattering of W bosons, an elementary particle that is one of the four fundamental interactions of nature, which is required in their proposed testing.
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