GLEN ELLYN, Ill. — It skipped tolls. It had a Twitter hashtag and a GPS tracker. It even posed for photos with groupies.
The 50-foot-wide, 15-ton electromagnet attracted a sensation wherever it went during its slow, 3,200-mile journey from New York to suburban Chicago. The land-and-sea trip culminated when scientists threw a rock-star’s welcome for the shrink-wrapped cargo Friday as it arrived at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory to help study blazing-fast particles.
The hulking magnet is a hand-me-down from New York, where it was built in the 1990s with aluminum and steel by scientists at the Brookhaven National Lab on eastern Long Island. It has superconducting coils inside and, at the time it was built, was the largest electromagnet in the world.
Fermilab officials plan to use the magnet in a physics experiment called Muon g-2 that will study subatomic particles at their lab in Batavia, outside Chicago. 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 discoveries in particle physics, said Chris Polly, manager of the Muon g-2 project at Fermilab.
