The ATLAS superconducting solenoid has been moved for nearly the last time and is now in position in the assembly hall on the Meyrin site at CERN, opposite the cryostat that will house the liquid-argon electromagnetic calorimeter. All that remains to do now is to slide the solenoid into the insulating vacuum vessel.
Built by Toshiba, under the responsibility of KEK in Japan, the solenoid is 2.4 m in diameter, 5.3 m long and weighs 5.5 tonnes. Its axial magnetic field of 2 Tesla will deflect the particles inside the ATLAS inner detector. The inner detector, which consists of three sub-detectors, will be installed inside the solenoid at a later date, before the complete structure is transported across the road from the main site to the ATLAS cavern at Point 1 on the ring of the Large Hadron Collider.
