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3,000-Mile Move of Major Electromagnet Delayed

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The storage ring was built in Long Island's Brookhaven National Laboratory. But now it's needed at Fermilab for the Muon g-2 experiment, an investigation into muons, subatomic particles that exist for just 2.2 millionths of a second. Compared with Brookhaven, Fermilab can generate more intense and pure beam of muons. Officials have said it costs about 10 times less to move the magnet halfway across the country than it would to build a new one at Fermilab. (Image credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory)

The move of a huge particle storage ring from New York to Chicago has been delayed one week due to bad weather.

Yesterday (June 16), the muon g-2 experiment was set to begin a 3,200-mile (5,000-kilometer) voyage from Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside of Chicago, according to ScienceInsider. But heavy rain and strong winds last week made the necessary prep work for the move impossible.

The 14-ton (12.7-tonne), 50-foot-wide (15-meter-wide) ring-shaped electromagnet is now scheduled to crawl across the lab's campus on Saturday (June 22) and get slowly towed overnight Sunday to a marina on Long Island's south shore, ScienceInsider reported. After being loaded onto a barge, the instrument will sail down the East Coast, around the tip of Florida, and make its way up the Mississippi. The journey is expected to last four to six weeks.

The route may sound circuitous but labs officials have said it's the cheapest and safest way to get the storage ring to its new home. Earlier experiments at Brookhaven suggested that muons — exotic subatomic particles that exist for just 2.2 millionths of a second — did not behave as predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics. Scientists are hoping to further investigate this discrepancy at Fermilab, which can generate a more intense, pure beam of muons.

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Megan Gannon
Megan Gannon
Live Science Contributor
Megan has been writing for Live Science and Space.com since 2012. Her interests range from archaeology to space exploration, and she has a bachelor's degree in English and art history from New York University. Megan spent two years as a reporter on the national desk at NewsCore. She has watched dinosaur auctions, witnessed rocket launches, licked ancient pottery sherds in Cyprus and flown in zero gravity. Follow her on Twitter and Google+.