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news release:
Giant
magnet goes underground at CERN
Geneva, Switzerland, 28 February 2007: At 6:00 am this morning the heaviest piece of the
Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) particle detector began a momentous journey into
its experimental cavern, 100 metres underground at CERN[1]. Using a huge
gantry crane, custom-built by the Vorspann System Losinger Group, the
pre-assembled central piece, containing the magnet and weighing as much as
five Jumbo jets (1920 tonnes) is being gently lowered into place.
“This is a
challenging feat of engineering, as there are just 20 cm of leeway between
the detector and the walls of the shaft,” said Austin Ball, Technical
Coordinator of CMS. “The detector is suspended by four massive cables, each
with 55 strands and attached to a step-by-step hydraulic jacking system,
with sophisticated monitoring and control to ensure the object does not sway
or tilt.” The entire process is expected to take about ten hours to
complete.
The first seven of 15 pieces of the CMS detector have already been lowered,
with the first piece arriving in the experimental cavern on 30 November
2006. The giant element being lowered today, which is 16 m tall, 17 m wide
and 13 m long, marks the halfway point in the lowering process with the last
piece scheduled to make its descent in Summer 2007.
This is a unique experience for a high-energy physics collaboration, as
experiments are typically constructed underground where the particle
accelerator is located. CMS has broken with tradition in order to start
assembly before completion of the underground cavern, taking advantage of a
spacious surface assembly hall to pre-assemble and pre-test the solenoid
magnet and the various detectors used to measure particles resulting from
collisions.
CMS is a general purpose experiment being prepared to take data at CERN’s
Large Hadron Collider[2] (LHC). Experiments at the LHC will allow physicists
to complete a journey that started with Newton's description of gravity.
Gravity acts on mass, but so far science is unable to explain why certain
particles have the masses they have. Experiments such as CMS may provide the
answer. LHC experiments will also probe the mysterious missing mass and dark
energy of the universe – visible matter seems to account for just 4% of what
must exist. They will investigate the reason for nature's preference for
matter over antimatter, and will probe matter as it existed at the very
beginning of time. “This is a very exciting time for physics,’ said CMS
spokesman Tejinder Virdee, “the LHC is poised to take us to a new level of
understanding of our Universe.” Notes for Editor:
[1] CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's
leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva.
At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech
Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy,
Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland
and the United Kingdom. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the
United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have
Observer status.
[2] The LHC is a particle accelerator, which will be the world’s largest and
most complex scientific instrument when it switches on in November 2007.
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