From Russia with scintillation

摘要

This week, one of the most ambitious and unusual bulk orders in science will finally be filled. At a former Soviet weapons plant in the Russian town of Bogoroditsk, workers will pull from one of their 159 ovens the last of thousands of highly specialized crystals being produced for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). The CMS, a scientific instrument the size of a building, is being assembled at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory outside Geneva in Switzerland.