(zee.news) - The world's largest superconducting magnet ever built has been successfully powered up to its operating conditions, reports Trend.
Called the Barrel Toroid because of its shape, this magnet is a vital part of ATLAS, one of the major particle detectors being prepared to take data at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator scheduled to turn on in November 2007.
ATLAS will help scientists probe the big questions of the Universe what happened in the moments after the Big Bang? Why does the material in the Universe behave the way it does? Why is the Universe we can see made of matter rather than anti-matter?
Dr Richard Nickerson, UK ATLAS project leader said the magnet started at the first attempt only, and this was an important milestone for the scientific study of the universe.
The toroidal magnets are critical to enabling us to measure the muons (a type of particle) produced in interactions. These are vital to a lot of the physics we want to study, so the successful test of the magnets is a great step forward," Dr. Nickerson said.
The ATLAS Barrel Toroid consists of eight superconducting coils, each in the shape of a round-cornered rectangle, five metres, 25m long and weighing 100 tonnes, all aligned to millimetre precision. It will work together with other magnets in ATLAS to bend the paths of charged particles produced in collisions at the LHC, enabling important properties to be measured.
Nickerson said that unlike most particle detectors, the ATLAS detector did not need large quantities of metal to contain the field because the field is contained within a doughnut shape defined by the coils.
This in effect, allowed the ATLAS detector to be very large, which in turn increased the precision of the measurements it could make.
He further said that at 46m long, 25m wide and 25m high, ATLAS was the largest volume detector ever constructed for particle physics.
"We can now say that the ATLAS Barrel Toroid is ready for physics," said Herman ten Kate, ATLAS magnet system project leader.
Among the several areas ATLAS will focus on are why particles have mass, what the unknown 96 percent of the Universe is made of, and why nature prefers matter to antimatter.
Dr Nickerson added that some 1800 scientists from 165 universities and laboratories representing 35 countries were building the ATLAS detector and preparing to take data next year.