A giant but delicate ring-shaped electromagnet glided past St. Louis earlier, nearing the end of its long cruise from New York to the suburbs of Chicago, where it will be a centerpiece of a major physics experiment.
For almost a month now, the huge piece of machinery has been on the move. After the electromagnet was loaded onto a barge near its former home at Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island, it crept down the East Coast, around the tip of Florida, through the Gulf of Mexico, and then started making its way up the Mississippi, pushed along by tugboat. By the time it gets to its new home — Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Illinois — the unusual cargo will have traveled about 3,200 miles (5,000 kilometers).
At Fermilab, the electromagnet will be central to the muon g-2 experiment, an investigation into the nature of ultra-rare subatomic particles called muons, which exist for just 2.2 millionths of a second.
