Full Text:
What do you get when you revive a beautiful 20-year-old physics machine, carefully transport it 3,200 miles over land and sea to its new home and then use it to probe strange happenings in a magnetic field? Hopefully you get new insights into the elementary particles that make up everything.
The Muon g-2 experiment, located at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, has begun its quest for those insights. On May 31, the 50-foot-wide superconducting electromagnet at the center of the experiment saw its first beam of muon particles from Fermilab’s accelerators, kicking off a three-year effort to measure just what happens to those particles when placed in a stunningly precise magnetic field. The answer could rewrite scientists’ picture of the universe and how it works.Image credit: Fermilab
