Friday, June 22, 2007

The Compact Muon Solenoid

This is an MSNBC news article on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), which is one of the massive detector at the LHC at CERN.

"It is the heaviest scientific experiment ever," said Steven Nahn, a physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is a member of the CMS research team.

To call this contraption "compact" seems like a gross misnomer: The CMS is compact only in relation to its rival sibling, the ATLAS detector, which is roughly twice as large but only half as massive. The contrasts in the weights and dimensions hint at the different designs for ATLAS and CMS - two detectors that are designed to probe the same types of subatomic mysteries.


If you ever had the chance to see one of these beast yourself, don't miss that opportunity. It is quite impressive.

Zz.

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