ATLAS begins to shape up
22 May 2002
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More large pieces of the ATLAS detector arrived recently at CERN,
the European laboratory for particle physics, near Geneva. The trailer
seen here carries the vacuum vessel for one half of the toroid magnet
that will form one of the end caps of the complete detector. ATLAS is a
huge new detector being built to study collisions at the new Large
Hadron Collider (LHC), 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 end-cap
toroid magnets is to bend the tracks of particles called muons, which will be able to penetrate through the ends of the barrel-shaped detector, so that their momentum can be measured.
The magnets will be superconducting, and will be kept at their very low
operating temperature within a vacuum vessel. View both half-vessels for one
end cap, each with a half-octagonal shape.
Credit: CERN
