Big Ring's Journey Starts Saturday, and You Can Follow Along

It’s going to be an exciting week here at the laboratory.

On Saturday, we’re kicking off a project I’ve been working on since I started here almost a year ago. I’ve written about it before, and this is the week it gets real. We’re actually moving a 50-foot-wide circular electromagnet from Long Island to the Chicago suburbs, in one piece, tilting it as little as possible.

Why are we doing this? Well, the experiment we’re conducting is called Muon g-2, and it will study tiny particles called muons with greater precision than ever before. If it works out the way we think it might, it could open the door to new physics beyond what we’ve seen, new particles beyond what we know. That’s exciting for us. In order to do this experiment fresh, we’d have to build a new magnet, at a cost of around $30 million.

But we’re not doing it fresh. We're building on a similar experiment conducted at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York in the ‘90s, and it just so happens that they built the perfect device to store those muons so we can study them. So we’re bringing it here. Total cost: about $3 million, or roughly 10 times less.

If you’ve read about this, you know the big ring is coming by barge south around Florida, and then up a number of rivers to Lemont, where it will be loaded on a truck and driven to Fermilab. We’ve firmed up the route we'll be taking, and we expect to start driving the ring here sometime in late July. We’ll be transporting it at night (three nights, actually) and using rolling roadblocks, coordinated by the Illinois State Police.

Here’s how it breaks down:

• Night #1: Lemont Road north to 87th Street west to I-355.
• Night #2: I-355 north to Route 56/Butterfield Road west to Route 53 south to I-88.
• Night #3: I-88 west to Route 59 north to Ferry Road west to Eola Road north into the Fermilab site.

Details could change, but that’s how it looks right now. If you’re interested in following the journey of the ring, we’ve just launched a website that will allow you to do that. It’s at muon-g-2.fnal.gov/bigmove, and it includes a GPS-powered map and all the latest updates. And of course, I’ll be updating you on this blog as we go.

Next week, I’ll be reporting from New York as we take the ring down to the waterfront. I’m pretty excited. We’re also working on ways to let you guys celebrate the ring’s arrival with us. Stay tuned for more on that. And if you post on Facebook and Twitter about it, use the hashtag #bigmove.

Operation: Big Ring has begun! More soon.