Atlas arrives piece by piece

22 January 2003

The biggest pieces of ATLAS - a huge new particle detector at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, near Geneva - are the vacuum vessels for the eight toroid magnets that will form the detector's huge cylindrical  magnetic field. ATLAS is being built to study collisions at the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is due to start up at CERN in 2007. It is designed to surround the collision point like a huge barrel and detect as many as possible of the hundreds of particles that will be produced in each collision. Many particles will stop within the detector, but some will escape to the outside. The aim of the toroid magnets is to bend the tracks of particles called muons, which will be able to penetrate through the sides of the basically cylindrical detector, so that their momentum can be measured. The magnets will be superconducting, and will be kept at their very low operating temperature within vacuum vessels like the one seen here. 

The operation seen here illustrates well the international nature of work on ATLAS. The 25 m long vacuum vessel has been transported by road to CERN from Spain by  special low-loading trailor, and is lifted off by crane with the aid of the yellow structure which itself came from Russia.

Credit: Paula Collins, CERN (Email: paula.collins@cern.ch)