I fully and completely admit that I am a total sucker for heavy machinery. It is something I have in common with most four-year-olds. Take us to a construction site, feed us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and we will be happy all day.
On that note, I couldn’t resist showing some pictures of the ‘small wheels’ being lowered. The small wheels are part of the Muon system. They are located between the end of the calorimeter and the toroid magnet end-caps. And they are the last big piece of the detector to be installed.
As the small wheels were assembled on surface, the first order of business is transporting the wheels to the ATLAS surface building. Fortunately CERN has many custom trucks for this kind of transport. Seen here one of the wheels is moved (very slowly) into the surface building on this massive, two-lane wide flat-bed truck. And this truck is just one of many in CERN’s armada of very cool transportation vehicles. These vehicles do contribute to frustrating local drivers, though. It is one of the interesting ‘features’ of the area. It is not uncommon, for example, to get stuck behind either some slow-moving tractor carrying hay or some slow-moving truck carrying a huge super-conducting dipole magnet.
From the surface building, the wheel is lowered by the crane down one of the access shafts to the ATLAS cavern. In the picture, one small wheel is attached to the crane and suspended over the access shaft, while the second (in the foreground) waits its turn.
So why do we call them small wheels? In this picture as the small wheel is lowered into the cavern, you can see one of its siblings, the ‘Big Wheel’ on the right. Small really is just relative.
Tags: ATLAS, installation
