Giant superconducting ring takes a road trip

[Nipuna]

(Image: Brookhaven National Laboratory)

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It looks like an alien spaceship about to take off on an intergalactic adventure. In reality this gargantuan object is a ring of superconducting magnets made by human hands, but its current journey is as bizarre as any a spacecraft might make.

The 15-metre-diameter ring was originally used at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to measure the magnetism of the muon, a subatomic particle that is essentially a heavier version of the electron. Now researchers at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, want to use it for a new experiment called Muon g-2. The only problem is moving it to its new home, about a third of the way across the US.

You can't just stick the ring in the mail, even if you could find a big enough stamp: so delicate is the wiring inside that even tiny disturbances would wreck it. That's why the ring has to move at a snail's pace on a specially designed truck. No one would want to get stuck in traffic behind this monster, so it only brought the ring to a nearby marina. There it was transferred to a barge, which is now sailing down the east coast.

The barge will round the tip of Florida before eventually chugging up the Mississippi river to Illinois, where the truck will take over again for the last leg of the journey. That's some detour.