News

ATLAS honours six new Thesis Award winners

On Valentine’s Day 2019, the ATLAS Collaboration took a break from the usual rhythm of scientific discussion to showcase some of its most junior members. In a celebration in CERN’s Main Auditorium, the collaboration held its 10th annual ATLAS Thesis Awards.

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Preparing ATLAS for the future

Long Shutdown 2 (LS2) of the Large Hadron Collider commenced last week, as the accelerator powered down and the entry to the ATLAS cavern opened wide. Over the next two years, teams from across the ATLAS Collaboration will be upgrading and consolidating their experiment. On the agenda: the refurbishments of key electronics, the maintenance of various detector components and – critically – the installation of new detectors.

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ATLAS completes data-taking for Run 2

Beams in the Large Hadron Collider came to a stop today, closing out four years of record-breaking operation for the ATLAS experiment. Run 2 saw the extraordinary exploration of the high-energy frontier, as the ATLAS experiment brought new understanding of particle physics.

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ATLAS celebrates “dedicated and creative” collaboration members with Outstanding Achievement Awards

On 11 October 2018, during its semestrial collaboration meeting at CERN, ATLAS celebrated outstanding achievements of its collaboration members with an awards ceremony. Established in 2014, the Outstanding Achievement Awards give recognition to excellent contributions made to the collaboration in all areas, excluding physics analysis.

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ATLAS observes elusive Higgs boson decay to a pair of bottom quarks

The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has – at long last – observed the Higgs boson decaying into a pair of bottom (b) quarks. This elusive interaction is predicted to make up almost 60% of the Higgs boson decays and is thus primarily responsible for the Higgs natural width. Yet it took over six years after the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson to accomplish this observation.

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ATLAS Around the World: the faces behind the physics

“Multiculturalism” isn’t just a buzzword for ATLAS, it’s a way of life. With members of over 90 different nationalities – spanning every populated continent – ATLAS is a cultural experiment as much as it is a scientific one. Our new ATLAS Around the World series invites you to meet people from every nationality represented in the collaboration, to gain an insight into the individual journeys that brought them to particle physics. All are from very different backgrounds, but share the common goal of understanding our universe.

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ATLAS reveals key results at ICHEP 2018

Feynman. Salam. Weinberg. For the past 50 years, the International Conference on High­Energy Physics (ICHEP) has been the meeting place of giants in the field. Now, a new type of giant dominates: the thousands­-strong collaborations of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) physicists.

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Summary of new ATLAS results for ICHEP 2018

The 2018 International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) kicked off this week in Seoul, South Korea. The ATLAS Collaboration will be unveiling a wide range of new results at ICHEP 2018, including major developments in the measurement of Higgs boson properties, observations of key electroweak production processes, new high precision tests of the Standard Model, and combinations of searches extending the reach to new physics.

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The Higgs boson: the hunt, the discovery, the study and some future perspectives

Many questions in particle physics are related to the existence of particle mass. The “Higgs mechanism,” which consists of the Higgs field and its corresponding Higgs boson, is said to give mass to elementary particles.

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Highlights from LHCP2018

Physicists from around the globe assembled this week at the Centre Domenico in Bologna, Italy, the site of Europe’s oldest university, to attend the sixth annual conference on Large Hadron Collider Physics (LHCP2018). The 425 participants enjoyed picturesque architecture, world-renowned cuisine, and a full menu of recent physics results from the LHC. A sample platter of a few of the tasty morsels is presented.

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ATLAS observes direct interaction of Higgs boson with top quark

The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN has announced the observation of Higgs bosons produced together with a top-quark pair. Observing this extremely rare process is a significant milestone for the field of High-Energy Physics. It allows physicists to test critical parameters of the Higgs mechanism in the Standard Model of particle physics.

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Are you up for the TrackML challenge?

Physicists from the ATLAS, CMS and LHCb collaborations have just launched the TrackML challenge – your chance to develop new machine learning solutions for the next generation of particles detectors.

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ATLAS starts new year of data-taking

On 28 April, the ATLAS Experiment began recording the first data for physics of 2018. This will be the final year of Run 2 operation of the Large Hadron Collider and will mark the conclusion of the rich 13 TeV data harvest. Starting in 2019, the accelerator and its experiments will enter a long upgrade and maintenance period.

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Hands-on particles: Schools worldwide analyse ATLAS data

Every spring, hundreds of universities around the world open their doors to high-school students for a day to give them hands-on experience in particle physics. The International Masterclass programme gives students the chance to use real data collected by the ATLAS detector and other LHC experiments to test the Standard Model and search for new particles.

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Beyond discovery: ATLAS explores the Higgs boson

The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN has released new studies of the Higgs boson using 13 TeV data collected in 2015 and 2016. The results further corroborate the Standard Model nature of the Higgs boson, and open doors to fresh searches for new physics.

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ATLAS on track for 2018 data taking

It’s kick off at the Large Hadron Collider! Proton beams are circulating once again in the accelerator, marking the start of a new year of exploration for the ATLAS experiment.

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New winners of the ATLAS Thesis Awards

The ATLAS Collaboration has over 5500 members in 182 institutions around the globe. But, did you know that over 1000 of these members are PhD students? ATLAS PhD students contribute strongly and critically to all areas of the experiment, while learning valuable skills for their degrees.

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First high-precision measurement of the mass of the W boson at the LHC

In a paper published today in the European Physical Journal C, the ATLAS Collaboration reports the first high-precision measurement at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the mass of the W boson. This is one of two elementary particles that mediate the weak interaction – one of the forces that govern the behaviour of matter in our universe. The reported result gives a value of 80370±19 MeV for the W mass, which is consistent with the expectation from the Standard Model of Particle Physics, the theory that describes known particles and their interactions.

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Explore virtual CERN with ATLAScraft

Enter the world of particle physics with the newly-launched ATLAScraft! Players can explore the CERN campus, shrink down to the size of a particle, and even conduct their own “experiments” in educational minigames.

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Broken symmetry: searches for supersymmetry at the LHC

A commentary by ATLAS physicists Paul de Jong and George Redlinger on the history, progress and future of the search for supersymmetry.

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Behind the scenes at ATLAS Week

A few times a year, the large LHC collaborations such as ATLAS organise an internal overview session. This photo essay will take you to the most recent of these “ATLAS Weeks” – giving you a glimpse behind the curtain, and exploring this essential part of the collaboration structure and life.

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Noble nuclei open new doors in ATLAS physics

Take something you think you understand, change it and see what happens. Earlier this month, the ATLAS Experiment put this basic scientific principle to the test during the first Large Hadron Collider (LHC) xenon run.

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ATLAS LIVE: Celebrating 25 years of discovery

To celebration of its 25th anniversary, ATLAS is hosting a series of Facebook live events today, Monday 2 October 2017. Explore key locations around CERN - including the ATLAS control room, Building 40 and the ATLAS TileCal workshop - while learning about the physics, construction and history of the ATLAS Experiment.

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On top of the top: ATLAS highlights from the TOP2017 workshop

The ATLAS collaboration presented exciting new results at the 10th International Workshop on Top Quark Physics (TOP2017), held in Braga (Portugal). The conference, which concluded today, brought together experimental and theoretical physicists specializing in the heaviest known elementary particle: the top quark.

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ATLAS sees first direct evidence of light-by-light scattering at high energy

Physicists from the ATLAS experiment at CERN have found the first direct evidence of high energy light-by-light scattering, a very rare process in which two photons – particles of light – interact and change direction. The result, published today in Nature Physics, confirms one of the oldest predictions of quantum electrodynamics (QED).

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