CERN milestone

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research and a corporate member of the IIR, has announced that an important milestone was reached in August 2005 with the installation of the two largest magnets ever built for experiments at CERN. On one side of the 27-km ring of the future Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the 230-tonne solenoid magnet for the CMS experiment has been rotated through 90° prior to insertion into its cryostat - the jacket that will cool the magnet to 4.2 K ( -269°C). On the opposite side of the ring, in the underground cavern where the ATLAS detector is being constructed, the last of eight 25-m long toroid magnet coils has been put into place, to complete a huge magnetic "barrel" that forms a major part of the detector.