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Popular Mechanics
4/22/22
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"Getting ready to start up the collider involves literally
tens of thousands of tests, Steerenberg says. The most time-consuming part is superconductor magnet-training.
Thousands of magnets, in coils of special electric cable, wind through the collider. The magnets are responsible for bending, focusing, and squeezing the particles into the best position for a maximum number of collisions. In order to work, the magnets need to be cooled to 1.9 kelvins, (-520.3 degrees Fahrenheit), a temperature
colder than outer space. (Nothing is colder than zero on the kelvin scale.) To chill them, the collider uses 150 tons of liquid helium. This temperature allows the magnets to work with 13,000 amps of electric current. For comparison, a standard five-millimeter LED usually requires a maximum current of 20
milliamps."
"When the machine warms up, the magnetic windings lengthen by 262.5 feet over the nearly 17 miles of collider."
"The CERN team has trained the magnets to operate at up to 6.8 tera electron volts of energy. That’s 6.8 million million electron volts..."
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