World's Largest Supercooled Magnet Activated

An anonymous reader writes to mention a C|Net article about the activation of the world's largest superconducting electromagnet. Switched on today at Geneva's CERN lab, the experiment is part of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project. The magnet, called ATLAS, worked on its first start up. From the article: "In use, the magnet will be used to bend the paths of particles formed from the collision of protons or lead ions accelerated to near light speeds in 27km diameter subterranean contra-rotating circular beams. The ATLAS experiment is one of five in the LHC, and engages 1,800 scientists from 165 universities and laboratories in 35 countries."

why

[tezbobobo]

I know the article says what it will be used for, but why do we need to bend the particles path, and why does the magnet need to be super cooled?

Re:The realy deep questions

[myowntrueself]

All particles move around in a soup of Higgs particles and thus acquire the appearance of being massive due to their interactions with this Higgs-soup.

Oh so the Higgs-soup is kind of like phlogiston or something similar?