A physicist at Denmark's Niels Bohr Institute has recreated one of the two main particle detectors at the Large Hadron Collider out of Lego - and the replica machine is to scale with the tiny Lego engineers that walk through its tunnels. Sacha Melhase used 9,500 pieces of Lego to build the model - a task which took him 35 hours.The Niels Bohr Institute covered his 2,000 Euro brick bill - hoping that Mehlhase's work would inspire interest in high-energy physics.
Mehlhase has contacted Lego to see if the Danish company is interested in making the model part of its official range. Planning a 3D model took him 48 solid hours of work - before he even began sorting the bricks. 'It illustrates all details, from the muon spectrometer and magnet system to the innermost pixel detector,' says Mehlhase. 'I do not have a straightforward construction manual yet, but I am working on it!'
The real Atlas detector - one of two detectors that sit on the 'ring' at the LHC to monitor particles created in the high-speed collision - is about 70 feet wide and weighs 7,000 tonnes. Mehlhase's model is a metre by half a metre.