Palazzani booms help build the world's largest particle detector

Two Italian Ragno Palazzani telescopic booms have been uses in the construction of Atlas, the detection element of the huge particle acceleration experiment, which will take place at CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland.

Atlas will observe the head on collisions between pairs of protons whose energies have been accelerated to terrific levels in the LHC (large hadron collider), which is a 27 km diameter, underground accelerator ring. The Atlas is the world's largest, general purpose particle detector, it is 46 m long, 25 m high and 25 m wide, it weighs 7000 tons and consists of 100 million sensors.

The 34 m working height TSJ 34 booms were used to manoeuvre the engineers and scientists who were building parts of Atlas around the detector. Because of the delicacy of the operations the cages were equipped with special anti-collision devices which stopped the movement of the boom if the basket got too close to the Atlas detector.

The work of building Atlas is now complete and the first experiments are planned to start in the autumn of this year.