Giant magnet lowered to underground particle detector

It sounds like a plan only Wile E. Coyote would attempt: Take a giant magnet weighing nearly 2,000 tonnes and slowly lower it 100 metres underground for use in experiments.

Engineers at the CERN lab in Geneva completed the task on Wednesday, taking 10 hours to lower the heaviest piece of a particle detectorscientists hope will help unlock many of the secrets of the universe.

The 1,920-tonne magnet was lowered by four massive cables — each with 55 strands — with just 20 centimetres of leeway between themagnet and the walls of the shaft.

The magnet is a key component of a particle detector designed not to capture super-quick road runners, but rathertheenergy signatures left by muons, tiny negatively charged particles similar to electrons.

These and many other particles will be created as a result of proton collisions directed by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a massive particle accelerator and collider expected to turn on in November 2007 and be fully functional by 2008.

The LHC is expected to be the most powerful tool yet for physicists hoping to uncover the secrets behind the laws of the universe, both on the tiny scale of quantum mechanics and the huge areas affected by galaxies and black holes.

The accelerator will push two proton beams through its 27-km long tunnel at speeds and energies never before reached and collide them into one another to create and detect a host of new particles. The detection or lack of detection of these particles could provide evidence that backs up or disproves our current theories of the universe.

More than 2,000 researchers will be working at the LHC to interpret the results of the proton collisions.