As lab experiments go, it don’t get much bigger than this. The world’s largest superconducting magnet was switched on for the first time and tested last week at CERN, the particle accelerator facility in Geneva, Switzerland.
The barrel toroid magnet is a major component of CERN’s Atlas detector. From next year, Atlas will be scouring the debris of protons smashed head-on in the Large Hadron Collider for signs of the Higgs boson, the particle thought to give all other particles their mass. It could also find evidence for supersymmetry, the proposed extension to the standard model of particle physics, and even see hints of extra dimensions.…
