ATLAS completes world’s largest jigsaw puzzle
Today the ATLAS1 collaboration at CERN2 celebrates the lowering of its last large detector element. The ATLAS detector is the world’s largest general-purpose particle detector, measuring 46 metres long, 25 metres high and 25 metres wide; it weighs 7000 tonnes and consists of 100 million sensors that measure particles produced in proton-proton collisions in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider3 (LHC). The first piece of ATLAS was installed in 2003 and since then many detector elements have journeyed down the 100 metre shaft into the ATLAS underground cavern. This last piece completes this gigantic puzzle.
“This is an exciting day for us,” said Marzio Nessi, ATLAS technical coordinator. “The installation process is coming to its conclusion and we are gearing up to start a new programme of physics research.”
Known as the small wheel, this is the final element to complete the ATLAS muon spectrometer, and will be journeying 100 metres into its underground experimental cavern. There are two ATLAS small wheels; though small in comparison to the rest of the ATLAS detector, they are each 9.3 metres in diameter and weigh 100 tonnes including massive shielding elements. They are covered with sensitive detectors to identify and measure the momentum of particles that will be created in the LHC collisions. The entire muon spectrometer system contains an area equal to three football fields, including 1.2 million independent electronic channels. As particles pass through a magnetic field produced by superconducting magnets, this detector has the ability to accurately track them to the width of a human hair.
Read more here.
Leave a Reply