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Thursday, October 28, 2010

Photo: Broken Magnet Highlights Largest Collider's Engineering Challenges


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An engineer examines Wheel C of the Muon Chamber, part of the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Different chambers inside the detector will help physicists tell what kinds of particles are created by the high-speed collisions of beams of protons.

The LHC, which is slated to begin operation in 2008, will be the world's largest particle accelerator and is expected to answer some of the great mysteries of the universe, such as why objects have mass, how many dimensions exsist, and what the universe was like in its earliest moments.

Photograph courtesy CERN