As Fermilab races to isolate the elusive Higgs Boson subquark particle, lab engineer Jim Kerby and his team are already building magnets twice as powerful for a next-gen accelerator. Magnets are the workhorses of a particle collider, acting as the machine's crosshairs, focusing the beams of high-energy protons just before they're smashed to bits. This prototype will measure more than 3 feet in diameter, reach a height of almost 23 feet, and weigh 10 tons; when it's tested this spring, the painstakingly calibrated cylinder will crank out a force at least 100,000 times that of Earth's magnetic field. Eighteen of Kerby & Co.'s magnets will be inside CERN's Large Hadron Collider when it goes live in 2005.
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