15-Ton Electromagnet Being Moved From New York To Fermilab

By Chuck Sudo in News on Jun 17, 2013 3:55PM

Photo credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

A 50-foot wide, 15-ton electromagnet will soon call Fermilab home but first it must travel 3,200 miles by land and sea to get to suburban Batavia.

The Muon g-2 (gee-minus-two) will begin its journey from Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York to Fermilab June 22, after being delayed this weekend because of bad weather on the East coast. It’s going to take about five weeks for the Muon g-2 to travel from Brookhaven to Fermilab. The first leg of the trip will involve moving the magnet from the Brookhaven campus to its front gate. From there, it will move along the William Floyd Parkway to the Smith Point Marina the night of Sunday, June 23 into the morning of Monday, June 24, with roadblocks and detours for vehicular traffic along the way to accommodate the Muon. The route will then take the magnet by sea up through the Gulf Coast and the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, to the Tennessee River, through Kentucky to the Mississippi River before finally entering Illinois, where it will float along the Illinois and Des Plaines rivers before completing its journey by truck to Batavia.

Brookhaven National Lab physicist Bill Morse said he initially didn’t believe the magnet could be moved. "But if you have a big problem, you find good people who can fix the problem. That's physics."

The magnet, which was built in the 1990s, will be used by Fermilab to study the properties of muons, which are subatomic particles that exist for only 2.2 millionths of a second. Lee Roberts of Boston University, a spokesman for the Muon g-2 experiment, said it would “cost 10 times less” to move the magnet from New York to Illinois than build a new one.

Fermilab has set up an interactive map where people can chart the progress of the magnet’s travels.