So, what have you been up to?
Oh, me? I’ve been telling people about the most amazing magnet you will ever see. About a week ago, I got to travel to Long Island to see this 50-foot-wide electromagnet, the centerpiece of Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment, up close.
I watched as crews attached it to a specially adapted truck and drove it, slowly and carefully, across the Brookhaven National Laboratory site. And the next night, I got to see them drive it down the William Floyd Parkway, making the 10-mile trip in about two hours and 15 minutes. The ring was then loaded on a barge and set on its journey south. It’ll go around the tip of Florida, then up a series of rivers before finding its way to Lemont later this month.
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And then we’re going to drive it to Fermilab. You’ll definitely be hearing more about this when it happens, but you can see the route the ring will take and track its progress here.
One thing this trip drove home for me: I can describe this ring all I want to, and it still won’t be any substitute for seeing it. Luckily, we took several photos and videos of the New York move, and we’ve compiled them all here for you.
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Pretty impressive, right? The folks on Long Island certainly thought so. A couple hundred of them lined the streets, watching the electromagnet roll by. And naturally, they had some questions. In fact, I’ve heard a few questions about this project repeatedly, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to answer a few of them.
Q: What is this thing you’re moving?
A: It’s a gigantic electromagnet, basically three rings made of aluminum with super-conducting coils inside. It was built at Brookhaven in the 1990s for an experiment similar to the one we plan to do here at Fermilab. Once it is moved here from Brookhaven, it will be used to store and study muons, a subatomic particle that lives for only 2.2 millionths of a second.
Q: It’s a magnet? Will it erase my credit cards? Or make my car fly through the air?
A: It’s an electromagnet, which means it’s not a magnet until we plug it in here at Fermilab. When it’s on the truck, it’s just a big hunk of metal.
Q: Why not just build a new one at Fermilab?
A: The device built at Brookhaven is exactly what we need for our experiment. Building a new ring would cost about $30 million. Moving it costs about 10 times less.
Q: Is it a spaceship? It looks like a spaceship.
A: It is not a spaceship.
Q: Why are you taking the ring south around Florida when you could bring it through the St. Lawrence Seaway?
A: Two reasons. First, the waters are calmer on the southern route, and since the magnet cannot twist beyond a certain tolerance without damaging the cables inside, calmer waters are better. And second, the southern route worked out to be considerably cheaper than the northern one.
Q: Are you aware that hurricane season is starting?
A: Yes, we are. The ring is scheduled to reach the Gulf of Mexico in mid-July. Statistically, 78 percent of all tropical storm days, 86 percent of all minor hurricanes and 96 percent of all major hurricanes occur after that, in the months of August, September and October. We have a window of calmer waters to the south before the worst of hurricane season hits, and we aimed for that window.
Q: How will you move this across the Illinois expressways?
A: We’ll be traveling at night, and we’ll use rolling roadblocks to close portions of the roads. The goal is to keep traffic disruption to a minimum. You’ll be able to get updates about road closings at the Big Move page and on Twitter.
Q: I see on the map that you’ll be heading west on I-88 from Route 53, but there’s no westbound ramp there. How will you do that?
A: We will close the roads and back onto I-88 using the eastbound ramp.
Q: Can I come see the ring when it arrives?
A: Definitely. We’re working on a public event for the ring’s arrival here at Fermilab. More news on that once we iron out the details.
Q: Seriously, though, is it a spaceship?
A: We promise you, it’s not a spaceship.
If you have any other questions, I’d be glad to answer them. This is going to be a pretty amazing thing, and having seen it in person, I can highly recommend checking it out when it starts rolling through the Fox Valley. As always, I’ll keep you informed here. Stay tuned.
Andre Salles is the media and community relations specialist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He can be reached at 630-840-6733 or asalles@fnal.gov.
