The Making of a New Collider

May/June 2008. By Katherine Bourzac

The silver cylinder in this video is a powerful magnet. It's being inserted into the heart of the Compact Muon Solenoid, one of the Large Hadron Collider's main particle detectors. When the Large Hadron Collider begins operation this summer, this magnet will guide the subatomic particles created during proton collisions toward particle detectors.