THE WORLD’S LARGEST AND MOST POWERFUL magnet, the ‘Central Solenoid’, is finally here – or at least, the first piece of it is. Fully assembled, it will be 18 m tall, 4 m wide, and weigh about 910 metric tons, meaning the decade-in-the-making magnet will be truly massive. Appropriately, it will find a home in southern France at the world’s largest fusion reactor, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), this year.
Constructing a magnet of this magnitude is one huge job. Engineers and technicians at General Atomics in San Diego have spent more than half a decade designing, fabricating, and testing