The Department of Energy’s Fermilab, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory designed, built and tested a powerful new magnet based on an advanced superconducting material. The magnet – about eight tons and as long as a semi-truck trailer – set a field-strength record.

Sixteen of these magnets in addition to eight produced by CERN will be used in the Large Hadron Collider to focus beams of protons into an infinitesimally tiny spot as they approach collision inside two different particle accelerators.