Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
The electromagnet, which weighs at least 15 tons, was the largest in the world when it was built by scientists at Brookhaven in the 1990s, Morse said. 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.
The experiment will study the properties of muons, subatomic particles that live only 2.2 millionths of a second. The results of the experiment could create new discoveries in the realm of particle physics, said Chris Polly, manager of the Muon g-2 project at Fermilab.
The move is expected to cost about $3 million, but Polly estimated that constructing an entirely new electromagnet needed for the Muon g-2 experiment could cost as much as $30 million.
The electromagnet, which weighs at least 15 tons, was the largest in the world when it was built by scientists at Brookhaven in the 1990s, Morse said. 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.
The experiment will study the properties of muons, subatomic particles that live only 2.2 millionths of a second. The results of the experiment could create new discoveries in the realm of particle physics, said Chris Polly, manager of the Muon g-2 project at Fermilab.
The move is expected to cost about $3 million, but Polly estimated that constructing an entirely new electromagnet needed for the Muon g-2 experiment could cost as much as $30 million.
It's not that there are a lack of particles in New York. In order to study particles, you have to accelerate them to as near the speed of light as possible using electromagnets capable of "propelling" these particles forward. For this, it also requires a large enough accelerator. Depending on the study, certain sized accelerators are more appropriate than others. In this case, the magnet moving to Fermilab is more suitable for the experiment in question.
It's not that there are a lack of particles in New York. In order to study particles, you have to accelerate them to as near the speed of light as possible using electromagnets capable of "propelling" these particles forward. For this, it also requires a large enough accelerator. Depending on the study, certain sized accelerators are more appropriate than others. In this case, the magnet moving to Fermilab is more suitable for the experiment in question.
"Let's try this," Sheldon says to Penny, "the Brookhaven National Laboratory's Cosmotron has been closed since 1968. Any further explanation would just confuse you."
Oh, come on. I am not going to watch a 48 minute video about this. Just tell my why these particles can't be studied at the current sight.
The original g2 experiment at Brookhaven used electrons and muons produced by protons hitting fixed targets installed on a beamline attached to the AGS a proton sychrotron accelerator. The AGS accelerated protons to an energy of 33 GeV and was built in the late 1950s and saw first beam in 1959. The AGS was the first such accelerator in the world to use strong focusing a principle used in every machine built since. It had conventional water cooled magnets and through improvements in its controls and our understanding of the theory of such machines and its operating systems like computerization it saw the intensity of its proton beams increase nearly a factor or 10,000. Work at the AGS won 4 Nobel prizes in physics and one can say the standard model and the concept of the quark come from work done by this one machine. It ran as stand alone high energy physics machine until 1999 when it was recycled into the RHIC complex as its booster ring and is now considered part of a nuclear physics machine although the BNL scientists still slip a few proton on proton collision experiments into the RHIC experimental program.
When the AGS was transfered to DOEs Office of Nuclear Physics for its funding, the High energy physics program at the AGS supported by the Office of High Energy Physics was shut down. High Energy Physics is still done at BNL but it is done at CERN on the LHC. BNL is the US base for the US LHC Program - it has one of three supercomputers in the world (one is at CERN and the other in Japan) where all LHC data is stored and analyzed, BNL hosts US-Atlas one of two Physics experiments on LHC whic the USA spent 500 million dollars building and has a c adre of about 2000 US Scientists using Atlas and the other LHC detector CMS. All of this was done as a consolation for abandonning the SSC some 19 years ago and keeping the USA involved in leading edge physics. When the AGS was converted into an ion accelerator experiments like g2 were shut down and retired and the muon storage ring was carefully mothballed at the AGS site.
So the g2 ring was useful hardware needing a new job and FermiLab was also in the same boat. FermiLab has The Tevatron and the Energy Doubler both proton accelerators that can produce proton beams reaching 1 TeV. It can do fixed target experiments up to 1 TeV and proton on proton collisions up to 2.0 TeV. It can make neutrinos all types, muon, tau particles and partices containing all types of quarks and their antiparticles. It even made a small number of Higgs particles but not enough to claim the Higgs discovery. Even though LHC now produces particles with energies greater than the Tevatron-energy doubler there is still a lot of great physics to be done with these machines just like the AGS was still doing cutting edge physics in the 1990s. FermiLab is frankly looking for new experiments to do and faces being shut down if it doesn't. FermiLab is pushing for a role as the worlds neutrino factory wher it will fire neutrino beams right through the Earth to experiments in Minnesota, South Dakota, Japan, China, and Europe. It could be the world's Top and Botton (Truth and Beauty) particle factory, and lastly it could be a muon collider and since the muon weighs 1/6th the proton and is a fundamental partice with no form factor it can focus all its energy into just one interaction thus reaching effective collision energies as much as 10 times greater than LHC. This would alow Americans to leap frog CERN and do physics far beyond LHC using a machine largely built a generation ago . The catch is muons are short lived particles and harder to store and handle. Harder but not impossible and the g2 experiment now gives us a reason to work with muons. So the g2 experiment has found a great home and one where it can be fed muons with higher intensity and much higher energy (up to 30 times more). So thats why we are dragging this storage ring and its magnets up the the Mississippi and across Illinios to now reside just outside of Chicago at Weaton Ill (where FermiLab is located). Some BNL scientists are also going to be making a lot of flights to O'Hare too. This is how we do high energy particle physics and the small (There are fewer than 3000 Americans who belong to this order of Mad Monks) community is ready to get to work and get back into the game.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
