Fermi Energy Scientists re-locating 15-ton magnet 3,200 miles for Intensity Frontier experiment

A model of the truck that will be used to transport the Muon g-2 ring, placed on a streetscape for scale. 

The truck will be escorted by police and other vehicles when it moves from Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to a barge, and then from the barge to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.  Credit: Fermilab 

A 50-foot-wide electromagnet ring built in suburban New York is headed on a five-week journey to Chicago.

The electromagnet weighs at least 15 tons and was the largest in the world when it was built by scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the 1990s.

Brookhaven scientists no longer have a need for the electromagnet, so it is being moved to the Fermi laboratory, where it will be used in a new experiment called Muon g-2. (MEW'-on jee-minus-two).

The results could create new discoveries in the realm of particle physics. The magnet will be taken by barge down the Atlantic, around Florida, then up the Mississippi River to Illinois.

The move is expected to cost about $3 million. But constructing an entirely new electromagnet could cost as much as $30 million.

FermiLab Statement
“Scientists from three Department of Energy national laboratories, Fermilab, Brookhaven and Argonne, along with scientists from seven foreign countries and more than a dozen U.S. universities [about 100 scientists all together] are collaborating on a new physics experiment that will probe fundamental properties of matter and space. Muon g-2 …is an Intensity Frontier experiment that will allow researchers to peer into the subatomic world to search for undiscovered particles that may be hiding in the vacuum.”