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Exploring the W boson at extreme mass scales

ATLAS physicists have measured the cross section for W bosons with transverse masses between 200 GeV and 5 TeV.

Physics Briefing | 15 Apr 2025

ATLAS Highlights from Quark Matter 2025

Last week, the ATLAS Collaboration presented new results at the Quark Matter 2025 conference, held in Frankfurt am Main (Germany). From detailed studies of the quark-gluon plasma’s collective motion to new measurements in ultra-peripheral collisions, ATLAS is providing new insight into the fascinating behaviour of heavy-ion collisions and the quark–gluon structure of nuclei.

News | 14 Apr 2025

ATLAS gets under the hood of the Higgs mechanism

Last week, at the Rencontres de Moriond conference, the ATLAS Collaboration brought physicists a step closer to understanding the nature of the electroweak symmetry-breaking mechanism.

Press Statement | 10 Apr 2025

ATLAS Collaboration awarded Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN has been awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for its pioneering studies of the high-energy collisions from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Press Statement | 07 Apr 2025

A transformative leap in physics: ATLAS results from LHC Run 2

While the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations remains the LHC's crowning achievement, the ATLAS Collaboration has since produced a wealth of groundbreaking results that continue to reshape particle physics. In this feature article, Andreas Hoecker delves into the remarkable breakthroughs uncovered by ATLAS using Run 2 data.

Feature | 07 Apr 2025

The LHC experiment collaborations at CERN receive Breakthrough Prize

This weekend, the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN were honoured with the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. The prize is awarded to the four collaborations, which unite thousands of researchers from more than 70 countries, and concerns the papers authored based on LHC Run-2 data up to July 2024. It was received by the spokespersons who led the collaborations during that time.

Press Statement | 07 Apr 2025

ATLAS probes the Higgs mechanism in the scattering of W boson

The ATLAS Collaboration reported the first evidence – with 3.3σ significance – of vector boson scattering involving longitudinally polarised, same-sign W bosons

Physics Briefing | 04 Apr 2025

ATLAS prepares for High-Luminosity LHC

The ATLAS Collaboration submitted four documents to the European Strategy Group (ESG), namely, an overview of the extensive ATLAS detector upgrade for the HL-LHC, a summary of the software and computing preparations to address the HL-LHC challenges, a joint update with CMS on HL-LHC physics expectations, and a joint document on prospectives for flavour physics.

News | 02 Apr 2025

Displaced but not unnoticed: ATLAS in pursuit of Long-Lived Particles

In a new study submitted to Physical Review D, scientists at the ATLAS experiment leveraged the muon spectrometer’s size and precision tracking capabilities to search for neutral LLPs by identifying displaced decay vertices.

Physics Briefing | 01 Apr 2025

Learning from the Tau

The ATLAS Collaboration has published two new papers investigating the production of tau leptons in high energy proton-proton collisions.

Physics Briefing | 31 Mar 2025

Boosting precision of top-quark mass measurement with ATLAS

The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN performed its most precise single measurement of the mass of the top quark, using high-transverse-momentum (“boosted”) top quarks.

Physics Briefing | 25 Mar 2025

Summary of new ATLAS results from Moriond 2025

Every Spring, all eyes turn to La Thuile (Italy) for the arrival of the annual Recontres de Moriond conferences. Explore the full list of new ATLAS results presented at Moriond.

News | 23 Mar 2025

Steering ATLAS forward with new management

The ATLAS Collaboration embarks on a new chapter under the leadership of Spokesperson Stéphane Willocq (University of Massachusetts Amherst).

News | 10 Mar 2025

ATLAS celebrates excellence in doctoral research

Among the more than 5500 members of the ATLAS Collaboration, PhD students play a vital role in advancing the experiment while pursuing their degrees. Every year, the ATLAS Thesis Awards celebrate their outstanding achievements, recognising the significant impact of their research on physics analyses, detector advancements, and software development.

News | 27 Feb 2025

Massive vector bosons also come in triplets

The ATLAS Collaboration announces the first observation of “VVZ production” – a rare combination of three massive vector bosons produced simultaneously at the LHC.

Physics Briefing | 31 Jan 2025

ATLAS releases first open data from heavy-ion collisions

The ATLAS Collaboration has released its first open data of heavy-ion collisions for research purposes. This dataset features lead-ion (Pb-Pb) collisions at an energy of 5 TeV per nucleon pair, recorded in 2015 as part of the Large Hadron Collider’s second operation period (LHC Run 2). Today’s release is the highest energy heavy-ion collision data ever made publicly available and the first LHC Run 2 heavy-ion open dataset.

News | 13 Dec 2024

The measurement of a lifetime: ATLAS releases new precision study of the B meson

This week, the ATLAS Collaboration announced a new high-precision measurement of the lifetime of the B0 meson. The B0 meson is composed of a bottom quark and a down antiquark. Measurements of its lifetime – the average time it exists before decaying – provide an exceptional probe of physics processes beyond the Standard Model.

Physics Briefing | 25 Nov 2024

ATLAS observes top quarks in lead-lead collisions

The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN has observed top-quark pair production in lead-lead ion collisions, marking the first observation of this process in nucleus-nucleus interactions.

Physics Briefing | 12 Nov 2024

Why stop at two? ATLAS hunts for the production of three Higgs bosons

At this week’s Higgs2024 conference, the ATLAS Collaboration unveiled the first LHC search for tri-Higgs production – a process over 600,000 times rarer than the production of a single Higgs boson.

Physics Briefing | 08 Nov 2024

Cracking open the Higgs shell: new ATLAS measurement of “off-shell” production uses AI techniques

ATLAS researchers are using innovative new techniques in their analysis of off-shell Higgs-boson production.

Physics Briefing | 06 Nov 2024

Advancements in particle tagging accelerate the search for new particles

The ATLAS Collaboration has released three major searches for new-physics phenomena, all utilising new advancements in particle tagging.

Physics Briefing | 05 Nov 2024

Decoding top quarks: Precision in heavy-flavour partner production

Two new studies from the ATLAS Collaboration explore how top-quark pairs are produced alongside heavy-flavour quarks, like bottom and charm.

Physics Briefing | 26 Sep 2024

LHC experiments at CERN observe quantum entanglement at the highest energy yet

In an article published today in Nature, the ATLAS collaboration reports how it succeeded in observing quantum entanglement at the LHC for the first time.

Press Statement | 18 Sep 2024

Unveiling Higgs-boson production properties using tau-lepton pairs

New measurements by the ATLAS Collaboration show that studying Higgs-boson decays into tau-lepton pairs can reveal not only its interactions with fermions, but also give insights into Higgs-boson production at the LHC. ATLAS researchers performed two kinds of cross-section measurements in their new analysis of Higgs-boson decays to tau leptons.

Physics Briefing | 21 Aug 2024

Transforming bottom-jets: machine learning for improved bottom-jets measurements

At the BOOST 2024 conference, the ATLAS Collaboration presented a new technique that employs artificial intelligence (AI) to refine jet calibration, specifically focusing on jets originating from bottom quarks (b-jets).

Physics Briefing | 30 Jul 2024

Breaking through (jet) barriers

As the most abundantly produced object in the ATLAS experiment, jets are critical to understanding a number of physics processes. In new results presented at the BOOST 24 conference in Genova (Italy), ATLAS scientists detailed two innovative approaches for more accurately quantifying jet properties.

Physics Briefing | 29 Jul 2024

Summary of new ATLAS results from BOOST 2024

The 16th International Workshop on Boosted Object Phenomenology, Reconstruction, Measurements, and Searches at Colliders (BOOST 2024) kicks off today in Genova (Italy). This year’s edition continues the tradition of bringing together leading experts from both theoretical and experimental backgrounds to discuss latest developments in the study of particle “jets”.

News | 29 Jul 2024

Breaking “R-parity” in new searches for supersymmetry

At the recent ICHEP 2024 conference held in Prague (Czech Republic), ATLAS physicists presented two innovative searches for R-parity-violating SUSY using data collected during the Run 2 of the LHC (2015 to 2018).

Physics Briefing | 25 Jul 2024

ATLAS releases precise new measurement of Higgs boson production in association with top quarks

At the recent International Conference on High-Energy Physics (ICHEP) 2024, the ATLAS Collaboration presented a new measurement of the ttH(bb) process using the same Run 2 dataset, achieving a factor of two better expected ttH signal significance compared to the previous result.

Physics Briefing | 23 Jul 2024

The beauty and the charm of the Higgs boson

The ATLAS Collaboration has just released the world’s most precise study of the Higgs boson’s interaction with bottom quarks and charm quarks. This new result is a re-analysis of data collected during Run 2 of the LHC (2015-2018). ATLAS researchers examined Higgs boson decays to bottom and charm quarks (H→bb and H→cc) implementing significantly improved analysis techniques.

Physics Briefing | 22 Jul 2024

ATLAS probes uncharted territory with improved trigger

The ATLAS Collaboration has released its first search for new physics phenomena at the highest-ever collision energy of 13.6 TeV, targeting exotic events with two “displaced” leptons.

Physics Briefing | 20 Jul 2024

Hunting for magnetic monopoles with the Universe's strongest magnetic fields

In a new result from the ATLAS Collaboration, physicists analysed the first Run-3 heavy-ion collision data collected in the autumn of 2023. Specifically researchers looked at “ultraperipheral” collisions, where ions pass at a distance precluding hadronic interactions yet close enough to interact through electromagnetic fields.

Physics Briefing | 18 Jul 2024

Summary of new ATLAS results from ICHEP 2024

The 2024 International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) kicks off this week in Prague, Czech Republic. For over 70 years, ICHEP has gathered physicists from around the world to share the latest advancements in particle physics, astrophysics, cosmology, and accelerator science, and to discuss plans for major future facilities.

News | 18 Jul 2024

ATLAS releases 65 TB of open data for research

The ATLAS Experiment at CERN has made two years’ worth of scientific data available to the public for research purposes. The data include recordings of proton–proton collisions from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at a collision energy of 13 TeV. This is the first time that ATLAS has released data on this scale, and it marks a significant milestone in terms of public access and utilisation of LHC data.

News | 01 Jul 2024

ATLAS and CMS celebrate a decade of innovation by the RD53 Collaboration

On 24 June 2024, during an awards ceremony in CERN’s Main Auditorium, the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations paid special recognition to the RD53 Collaboration.

News | 01 Jul 2024

Celebrating excellence at the 7th ATLAS Outstanding Achievement Awards

The ATLAS Collaboration held the 7th Outstanding Achievement Awards Ceremony on 20 June 2024. These biennial awards recognize the invaluable technical work performed across the Collaboration in various fields.

News | 01 Jul 2024

Jetting into a new era of Higgs studies

The ATLAS Collaboration has made a significant advancement in the understanding of the Higgs boson by investigating its production in association with W or Z bosons (known as “VH production”), where the Higgs boson decays to bottom quarks. For the first time, LHC researchers have studied VH production in a fully hadronic final state.

Physics Briefing | 20 Jun 2024

ATLAS searches for the building blocks of dark matter

Researchers at the ATLAS Experiment release the first-ever direct search for new composite dark particles called dark mesons, presented this week at the Large Hadron Collider Physics (LHCP) Conference in Boston.

Physics Briefing | 08 Jun 2024

ATLAS dives deeper into di-Higgs: a combined search

In a new analysis from the ATLAS Collaboration, physicists merged five di-Higgs studies of LHC Run 2 data. By combining the power of all these decay channels, researchers achieved the most sensitive probe of di-Higgs production and the Higgs self-coupling.

News | 06 Jun 2024

Learning by machines, for machines: Artificial Intelligence in the world's largest particle detector

Julia Gonski explains the long-established use of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) in high-energy physics research and explores the exciting potential these technologies hold for the field.

Feature | 05 Jun 2024

ATLAS chases long-lived particles with the Higgs boson

In a new study submitted to Physical Review Letters, ATLAS scientists used a new algorithm to search for long-lived particles (LLP) produced in the decay of Higgs bosons. These LLPs may leave a distinct signature of one or more hadronic “jets” of particles originating at a significantly displaced position from the proton–proton collision point.

Physics Briefing | 03 Jun 2024

Summary of new ATLAS results from LHCP 2024

The twelfth annual conference on Large Hadron Collider physics (LHCP 2024) kicks off today in Boston, USA. This week-long event will feature a detailed review of the latest experimental and theoretical results in collider physics, including several final studies of the LHC Run-2 dataset (collected in 2015-2018) and discussions on future research directions for the high-energy particle-physics community.

News | 03 Jun 2024

Looking for the extended family of the Higgs boson

The ATLAS Collaboration has just published a search for two new Higgs bosons, X and S, that would interact with the Standard-Model Higgs boson.

Physics Briefing | 26 Apr 2024

Menu of the day: Di-Higgs soup!

If spotting one Higgs boson is interesting, what happens when you spot two? ATLAS researchers are looking for the production of two Higgs bosons using a new technique.

Physics Briefing | 19 Apr 2024

ATLAS explores Z boson production with heavy-flavour quarks

Using the full LHC Run-2 dataset, the ATLAS Collaboration measured Z boson production in association with both bottom (b) and charm (c) quarks, the latter for the first time in ATLAS.

Physics Briefing | 15 Apr 2024

ATLAS detects electrons and photons with greater clarity

New results released by the ATLAS Collaboration describe the significant advancements made in identifying electrons and photons.

Physics Briefing | 12 Apr 2024

ATLAS mourns the loss of Peter Higgs

The ATLAS Collaboration mourns the passing of renowned physicist Peter Higgs, whose theoretical work on elucidating the fundamental spontaneous symmetry-breaking mechanism by which elementary particles acquire mass reshaped our understanding of the Universe.

News | 10 Apr 2024

ATLAS provides first measurement of the W-boson width at the LHC

In a groundbreaking new result, the ATLAS Collaboration has measured the W-boson width for the first time at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Physics Briefing | 05 Apr 2024

First ATLAS measurement of W and Z boson production using Run-3 data

The ATLAS Collaboration has just released its first measurements using LHC Run-3 data of the production rates (“cross sections”) of W and Z bosons.

Physics Briefing | 28 Mar 2024

Measuring the delicate balance of lepton flavours

In a new result presented at Moriond EW, physicists at the ATLAS Collaboration tested lepton flavour universality between muons and electrons. The precision of the result stands as the best yet-achieved in W-boson decays by a single experiment and surpasses the world average.

Physics Briefing | 25 Mar 2024

Summary of new ATLAS results from Moriond 2024

This year, the start of Spring marks the beginning of the conference season for particle physicists! All eyes turn to La Thuile, Italy, where the annual Recontres de Moriond conferences will be held.

News | 22 Mar 2024

ATLAS searches for new particles in familiar decays

In a new result, researchers conducted a novel search of data collected during Run 2 of the LHC, searching for heavy new particles that could fit the 2HDM or 2HDM+S models.

Physics Briefing | 05 Mar 2024

ATLAS Management 2024

ATLAS welcomes new member to its management team

The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN welcomes a new member to its management team. Martin Aleksa (CERN) joins as Technical Coordinator for the experiment, picking up the torch from Ludovico Pontecorvo (CERN).

News | 29 Feb 2024

Meet the winners of the 2023 ATLAS Thesis Awards

The ATLAS Collaboration celebrated the achievements of its exceptional PhD students at the recent Thesis Awards ceremony. Established in 2010, the ATLAS Thesis Awards recognize the remarkable contributions made by students to the ATLAS Collaboration through their doctoral theses.

News | 22 Feb 2024

In conversation with Ana Henriques Correia, a key player in the development of the ATLAS Calorimeter

Ana Henriques arrived at CERN in 1988 as a summer student, and never wanted to leave. She assumed the roles of technical coordinator and project leader of the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter, being involved in its design, construction, and installation processes.

Portrait | 30 Jan 2024

ATLAS measures rare Higgs boson interaction with tau leptons

In a new result, the ATLAS Collaboration reports the first evidence of a Higgs boson produced in association with a leptonically-decaying W or Z boson and decaying into a pair of tau leptons.

Physics Briefing | 15 Dec 2023

Exploring the Weak Force with ATLAS

As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the observation of neutral currents and the 40th anniversary of the W/Z boson discovery, we take a look back on the 13 years of ATLAS research into the weak force.

News | 30 Nov 2023

Searching for supersymmetric needles in the LHC haystack

The ATLAS Collaboration has published three new results in this challenging area, using Boosted Decision Trees (BDTs) to isolate potential signals and ultimately set stringent constraints on the masses of SUSY particles.

Physics Briefing | 20 Nov 2023

ATLAS Live talk: Chasing the unknown (with the very well known!) by Dr Ludovica Aperio Bella

On 16 November 2023 at 6pm CET, Dr. Ludovica Aperio Bella will give a live public talk on the ATLAS Youtube Channel about precision measurements at the LHC.

News | 15 Nov 2023

From internship to authorship: one student’s unique journey in ATLAS

Lukas Kretschmann, a physics student at the University of Wuppertal in Germany, shares his journey in the ATLAS Collaboration – which began as a high-school student!

Blog | 30 Oct 2023

ATLAS Week: through the eyes of students

ATLAS Week is an opportunity for young physicists to present and discuss their work. ATLAS students Sarah and Bruna were at the last ATLAS Week in Vancouver, Canada, and share what the experience was like for them.

Blog | 18 Oct 2023

ATLAS gains momentum in study of charmonium

The ATLAS Collaboration has measured the production cross section of the J/ψ and ψ(2S) charmonium states in terms of the transverse momentum and the rapidity. For both states, they examined the widest range of transverse momentum so far, thus providing new input for theoretical models.

Physics Briefing | 10 Oct 2023

ATLAS and CMS unite to weigh in on the top quark

The ATLAS and CMS Experiments at CERN have just released a new measurement of the mass of the top quark. The new result combines 15 previous measurements to give the most precise determination of the top quark mass to date.

Physics Briefing | 02 Oct 2023

ATLAS achieves highest-energy detection of quantum entanglement

In a new result from the ATLAS Collaboration, physicists observed – for the first time – quantum entanglement between a pair of quarks. This is the highest-energy measurement of entanglement to date.

Physics Briefing | 28 Sep 2023

ATLAS measures strength of the strong force with record precision

The result showcases the power of the LHC to push the precision frontier and improve our understanding of nature.

Press Statement | 25 Sep 2023

Shedding light on Higgs-boson self-interactions

The ATLAS Collaboration has released two brand-new results searching for di-Higgs events in the full LHC Run-2 dataset. In one, researchers looked for events where one Higgs boson decays into two bottom quarks and the other decays into two photons. In the other, they looked for events where one Higgs boson decays into two bottom quarks, and the other into two tau leptons or W/Z bosons, which subsequently decay into leptons.

Physics Briefing | 21 Sep 2023

ATLAS Live talk: How does ATLAS study heavy-ion collisions?

On 14 September at 6pm CEST, Dr. Martin Rybar and Dr. Peter Steinberg will give a live public talk on the ATLAS Youtube Channel on how the ATLAS experiment records heavy-ion collisions.

News | 14 Sep 2023

A summer for science

For many students, a summer internship is a rite of passage — and a gateway to future jobs. Looking for a valuable glimpse into what a future in physics might hold, dozens of university students from around the world headed to CERN to participate in the Summer Student Programme and engage with cutting-edge scientific research at the ATLAS Experiment. With the support of their supervisors, these students have been deepening their knowledge of particle physics, engineering and computing through challenging projects. These are the stories of 12 of these students.

News | 08 Sep 2023

ATLAS observes top quarks in proton-lead collisions

The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN observes the production of top-quark pairs in proton-lead ion collisions. ATLAS’ new result confirms and builds upon an earlier observation made by the CMS Collaboration, expanding it into a new decay channel.

Physics Briefing | 06 Sep 2023

When jets go dark: identifying elusive "dark jets" at ATLAS

For the very first time, the ATLAS Collaboration has searched for dark jets that closely resemble QCD jets. Instead of originating from Standard-Model particles, these dark jets would be produced through a new, heavy particle called the Z' boson.

Physics Briefing | 06 Sep 2023

Summary of new ATLAS results from Quark Matter 2023

The ATLAS Collaboration has prepared a variety of new results for the Quark Matter conference, focusing on the study of collisions involving lead ions, xenon, and lead ions with protons.

News | 04 Sep 2023

ATLAS measures ZZ production using Run-3 data and a new slim data format

The ATLAS Collaboration has just released a new measurement of the production cross section of two Z bosons. This highlight result examines data collected during Run 3 of the LHC and pioneers the use of PHYSLITE, a new, reduced data format that requires significantly less storage.

Physics Briefing | 25 Aug 2023

ATLAS searches for new phenomena using unsupervised machine learning for anomaly detection

In a new paper submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett., the ATLAS Collaboration pioneers the use of unsupervised machine learning to search for anomalous collision events which could be from new physics phenomena.

Physics Briefing | 24 Aug 2023

Quest for the curious magnetic monopole continues

In a new study presented at the EPS-HEP 2023 conference, the ATLAS Collaboration combed through the full LHC Run-2 dataset (recorded 2015-2018) in search for magnetic monopoles and HECOs (see Figure 1). The result places some of the tightest limits yet on the production rate of magnetic monopoles.

Physics Briefing | 23 Aug 2023

ATLAS releases comprehensive review of supersymmetric dark matter

In new results presented today, the ATLAS Collaboration provides its most comprehensive overview of the searches for weakly-interacting supersymmetric particles. By developing new search algorithms and exploiting machine learning techniques, researchers have probed deep into this difficult-to-reach territory.

Physics Briefing | 22 Aug 2023

Three’s no crowd: ATLAS measures tri-boson production

The ATLAS Collaboration has announced the first observation of two different tri-boson processes: the simultaneous production of a W boson with two photons (Wγγ) and the production of a W boson, a Z boson and a photon (WZγ). The production of a Z boson with two photons (Zγγ) was first observed in 2016 using data from LHC Run 1 (2010-2013). In a new publication, the ATLAS Collaboration expanded the scope of this initial observation using Run 2 data.

Physics Briefing | 18 Aug 2023

ATLAS hunts for new physics in the scattering of W bosons

Vector boson scattering processes play a special role within the Standard Model, as they are closely related to the Higgs mechanism and can proceed via an exchange of a Higgs boson. By studying these processes, ATLAS physicists are exploring multiple new-physics models, including anomalous self-interactions of the W bosons and extended Higgs sector with additional Higgs bosons.

Physics Briefing | 08 Aug 2023

Machine learning is revolutionising our understanding of particle “jets”

This week, ATLAS physicists presented four exciting new results about jet tagging using AI algorithms at the BOOST 2023 conference held at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (USA).

Physics Briefing | 03 Aug 2023

Signal and noise: how timing measurements and AI are improving ATLAS event reconstruction

The ATLAS Collaboration has released two new results explaining how detector timing measurements and calorimeter signal calibration using artificial intelligence (AI) are being used to further improve the quality of data recorded by the experiment.

Physics Briefing | 01 Aug 2023

Summary of new ATLAS results from BOOST 2023

The 15th International Workshop on Boosted Object Phenomenology, Reconstruction, Measurements, and Searches at Colliders (BOOST 2023) kicks off today in Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, California (USA). The conference brings together experts from the LHC experiments and the theory community to discuss new approaches for using “jets” of particles in studies of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) and searches physics beyond the Standard Model.

News | 31 Jul 2023

ATLAS sets record precision on Higgs boson’s mass

The new result is the most precise determination of the Higgs-boson mass yet, achieving a remarkable accuracy of 0.09% for this fundamental parameter.

Press Statement | 21 Jul 2023

ATLAS measures Higgs boson mass with unprecedented precision

This week, at the Lepton-Photon Conference in Melbourne (Australia), the ATLAS Collaboration presented its measurement of the Higgs boson mass in studies of Higgs decays to two photons using the full LHC Run-2 dataset (“H→yy” or the diphoton channel), and a new combination of this measurement with the 2022 measurement of the Higgs boson mass in studies of the Higgs decays to four leptons (the “H→4l channel”).

Physics Briefing | 21 Jul 2023

Summary of new ATLAS results from 2023 summer conferences

The summer conference season is here! While for some, summer means slowing down – for ATLAS researchers, it means the start of new conferences, with more new results to be presented! This season, experimental physics and theorists will be traveling to Melbourne, Australia, for the International Symposium on Lepton Photon Interactions at High Energies (Lepton Photon), and to Hamburg, Germany, for the European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics ( EPS-HEP).

News | 17 Jul 2023

Giving collisions a new shape: New ATLAS result measures isotropy of LHC events

When studying the shape of LHC collision events, physicists ask: how similar or different is their energy flow? The ATLAS Collaboration recently published a measurement of new collision event shapes in high-energy multijet events at the LHC.

Physics Briefing | 14 Jul 2023

Evolving ATLAS conditions data architecture for LHC Runs 3 and 4

For Run 3 of the LHC (2022–ongoing), the ATLAS Collaboration decided to change how it stores and processes conditions data. The significant efforts that went into this change – and the motivations for them – were presented at the 26th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics in May.

Experiment Briefing | 22 Jun 2023

ATLAS highlights from LHCP 2023

Over 300 physicists travelled to Belgrade (Serbia) for LHCP’s long-awaited return to in-person gatherings. Scientists from the ATLAS Collaboration presented several new results at the LHCP conference. These newly released results cover a broad range of physics topics, including precision measurements of the W± and Z bosons, evidence of the Higgs-boson decay into a Z boson and a photon, and searches for a new scalar particle.

News | 16 Jun 2023

Not a jet all the way: is dark matter hiding in plain sight?

What happens if dark-matter particles are produced inside a jet of Standard-Model particles? This leads to a novel detector signature known as semi-visible jets! The ATLAS Collaboration has come up with a new search for semi-visible jets, looking for them in a general production mode where two protons interact by exchanging an intermediate particle, which is then converted into two jets.

Physics Briefing | 26 May 2023

LHC experiments see first evidence for rare Higgs boson decay into two different bosons

The ATLAS and CMS Collaborations have joined forces to report first evidence of the Higgs boson decaying into a Z boson and a photon.

Physics Briefing | 26 May 2023

LHC experiments see first evidence of a rare Higgs boson decay

ATLAS and CMS teamed up to find the first evidence of the rare process in which the Higgs boson decays into a Z boson, the electrically neutral carrier of the weak force, and a photon, the carrier of the electromagnetic force.

Press Statement | 26 May 2023

New high-precision measurements of W and Z boson properties

At the 2023 LHCP conference, ATLAS physicists presented precise new measurements of the W± and Z boson transverse momentum distributions at two centre-of-mass energies: 13 TeV and, for the first time, 5.02 TeV. These results give unprecedented information on these transverse-momentum shape spectra, providing crucial input for other studies of these bosons.

Physics Briefing | 25 May 2023

ATLAS measures the Higgs boson at 13.6 TeV

The ATLAS Collaboration just released new measurements of the production rate (or cross-section) of Higgs bosons at 13.6 TeV using data collected in the second half of 2022.

Physics Briefing | 24 May 2023

Summary of new ATLAS results from LHCP 2023

The eleventh annual conference on Large Hadron Collider physics (LHCP 2023) kicks off today in Belgrade (Serbia) signaling the return of this week-long event to its face-to-face format. The programme of this edition covers the wide spectrum of Large Hadron Collider physics and technology, from several final studies of the LHC Run-2 dataset (2015-2018) to detailed assessments of the upgraded accelerators and detectors for Run 3.

News | 22 May 2023

ATLAS Live: Behind the Scenes at the Control Room

On 5 May at 4pm CEST, ATLAS physicists Dr. Stefanie Morgenstern and Dr. Liaoshan Shi will give a live tour of the ATLAS Control Room on the ATLAS and CERN Youtube Channels.

News | 04 May 2023

ATLAS highlights from the Moriond 2023 conference

ATLAS researchers presented several new results at the recent Rencontres de Moriond conference, spanning over a decade of LHC data.

News | 02 May 2023

ATLAS & CMS Physicists Recover Lost Higgs Boson

Scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN breathed a sigh of relief today, as the world-renowned Higgs boson returned to its showcase in the heart of the laboratory.

Blog | 01 Apr 2023

Probing fundamental symmetries of nature with the Higgs boson

In the new results presented at the Moriond conferences, the ATLAS Collaboration tested the CP invariance of Higgs-boson interactions with vector bosons (W or Z bosons).

Physics Briefing | 31 Mar 2023

ATLAS Event Display: Top-quark-pair production in Run 2 data

LHC passes a new milestone as a precision machine

The ATLAS Collaboration has just published the most precise measurement to date of the production cross section of top-quark pairs. The measured value is 829 ± 15 picobarns and has a relative uncertainty of just 1.8%.

Physics Briefing | 24 Mar 2023

ATLAS confirms mild tension in production of top-quark pairs with a W boson

The ATLAS Collaboration has released the most detailed analysis to date of the production of top-quark pairs alongside a W boson.

Physics Briefing | 24 Mar 2023

ATLAS observes the simultaneous production of four top quarks

The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN announces the observation of the simultaneous production of four top quarks. This is one of the rarest – and heaviest – processes ever observed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), with a total particle mass of almost 700 GeV.

Physics Briefing | 24 Mar 2023

ATLAS measures the strength of the strong force

The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN has released a precise new measurement of the Z-boson transverse momentum. This has allowed researchers to determine the strength of the strong force. Their result has less than 1% uncertainty, making it the most precise determination of the strong force ever made by a single experiment.

Physics Briefing | 23 Mar 2023

New ATLAS result weighs in on the W boson

The ATLAS Collaboration has measured the W boson mass to be 80360 MeV with an uncertainty of 16 MeV – in agreement with the Standard Model.

Physics Briefing | 23 Mar 2023

Measurements of the W boson mass

Improved ATLAS result weighs in on the W boson

The new ATLAS measurement concurs with, and is more precise than, all previous W mass measurements except one – the latest measurement from the CDF experiment at the Tevatron, a former accelerator at Fermilab.

Press Statement | 22 Mar 2023

Searching from top to bottom for lepton unity

The ATLAS Collaboration has released an impressive set of searches for leptoquarks interacting with third-generation leptons or quarks – placing valuable constraints on leptoquark parameters.

Physics Briefing | 22 Mar 2023

Tau & co.: the search for new physics with the heaviest leptons

The ATLAS Collaboration has released two new studies of the tau lepton, investigating whether this elementary particle may actually be composite in nature.

Physics Briefing | 21 Mar 2023

Summary of new ATLAS results from 2023 Winter Conferences

The winter conference season has begun! This month, all roads lead to La Thuile in the Italian Alps, where experimental physicists and theorists will take part in some of the most important particle physics meetings of the year. The La Thuile and Rencontres de Moriond conferences promise not to disappoint, with topical sessions ranging from heavy-ion and neutrino physics, to dark matter searches and astroparticle observations.

News | 16 Mar 2023

In conversation with Kevin Einsweiler, an instrumental voice in ATLAS upgrades

Kevin Einsweiler is a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL). He joined the ATLAS Collaboration in 1993, playing an instrumental role in bringing US institutes into the LHC programme. He served as ATLAS Pixel Project Leader (2005-2009), Physics Coordinator (2011-2013) and Upgrade Coordinator (2014-2019).

Portrait | 06 Mar 2023

ATLAS management begins new term

The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN welcomes a new management team at its helm. Spokesperson Andreas Hoecker (CERN) will continue to steer the experiment until March 2025.

News | 06 Mar 2023

Winners of the 2022 ATLAS Thesis Awards announced

Behind nearly every great ATLAS result lies an outstanding PhD student! Students are a key cohort of the ATLAS Collaboration, making critical contributions to the experiment while working on their degree. Every year, the Collaboration comes together to celebrate their work in the context of the ATLAS Thesis Awards.

News | 20 Feb 2023

ATLAS delivers most precise luminosity measurement at LHC

The ATLAS Collaboration has just released its most precise luminosity measurement to date. They studied four years of measurements (2015-2018), covering the entire Run 2 of the LHC to assess the amount of luminosity delivered to the ATLAS experiment.

Experiment Briefing | 24 Jan 2023

A new ATLAS for the high-luminosity era

Stefan Guindon, Christian Ohm and Caterina Vernieri describe the major ‘Phase II’ upgrades taking place to prepare the ATLAS detector for the High-Luminosity LHC.

Feature | 18 Jan 2023

ATLAS casts wide net in search for new high-mass particles

The ATLAS Collaboration has performed an extensive search for new, high-mass particles that can decay to a pair of W bosons. As many theoretical models predict the existence of such high-mass particles, physicists were able to investigate the validity of several models at once across a large energy range.

Physics Briefing | 01 Dec 2022

ATLAS moves into top gear for Run 3

The ATLAS Collaboration has just released its first Run 3 measurements, studying data collected in the first half of August 2022. Researchers have measured the interaction strength (or cross-section) of two well-known processes: the production of a pair of top quarks and the production of a Z boson.

Physics Briefing | 30 Nov 2022

ATLAS finds evidence of off-shell Higgs boson production and measures Higgs boson’s total width

In a highlight result presented at the Higgs 2022 conference, the ATLAS Collaboration studied the production of off-shell Higgs bosons with a high invariant mass decaying into two on-shell Z bosons using the data collected during LHC Run 2 (2015-2018). For their new search, ATLAS physicists focused on events where the two Z bosons decay into four charged leptons (ZZ→4l channel) or two charged leptons plus two neutrinos (ZZ→ 2l2v channel), as they offered the highest signal sensitivity.

Physics Briefing | 15 Nov 2022

ATLAS and Seal Storage Technology collaborate on new archival storage

The ATLAS Collaboration has partnered with Seal Storage Technology in a pilot project to explore their decentralised cloud storage platform as an efficient and cost-effective option for archival data storage

News | 28 Oct 2022

ATLAS celebrates 30 years of collaboration

The ATLAS Collaboration celebrated its 30th anniversary on 1 October 2022.

News | 01 Oct 2022

ATLAS Live talk: Searching for new, long-lived particles at the LHC with Dr. Hideyuki Oide

On 6 October at 2pm CET, Dr. Hideyuki Oide will give a live public talk on the ATLAS Youtube Channel on the LHC's search for new, long-lived particles.

News | 27 Sep 2022

Using the Higgs boson to search for dark photons

The ATLAS Collaboration has been looking for signs of dark photons in data collected by the experiment during LHC Run 2 (2015-2018). Their newest search targets, for the first time in ATLAS, the production of a Higgs boson in association with a Z boson, with subsequent decay of the Higgs into a photon and a dark photon.

Physics Briefing | 15 Sep 2022

ATLAS Highlights from ICHEP 2022

At ICHEP 2022, the ATLAS Collaboration presented the results of 30 new studies, spanning from Higgs boson and Standard Model measurements to searches for new phenomena.

News | 22 Jul 2022

ATLAS observes potential four-charm tetraquark

In a new analysis presented at the ICHEP 2022 conference, ATLAS physicists found evidence of a four-charm-quark excess. Like the LHCb Collaboration, ATLAS sees both the X(6900) particle and a broad structure at threshold.

Physics Briefing | 09 Jul 2022

ATLAS measures quantum interference when protons bounce off each other

In a new result presented at ICHEP 2022, ATLAS physicists set out to measure proton scattering at microradian angles and study this quantum interference.

Physics Briefing | 08 Jul 2022

ATLAS measures joint polarisation of W and Z bosons

In a new result presented at the ICHEP 2022 conference, ATLAS physicists have been able to observe events with both a W and Z boson simultaneously polarised longitudinally for the very first time.

Physics Briefing | 07 Jul 2022

Summary of new ATLAS results from ICHEP 2022

The 2022 International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) kicks off this week in Bologna, Italy. The ATLAS Collaboration will be unveiling a wide range of new results, exploring the full potential of the dataset collected during LHC Run 2 (2015-2018).

News | 06 Jul 2022

ATLAS celebrates the Start of Run 3

ATLAS Experiment records “first physics” at new high-energy frontier

“We have proton collisions in the ATLAS experiment.” At 16.47 CEST, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) officially kicked off its third period of operation (Run 3). The LHC is colliding proton beams at a world-record-breaking energy of 13.6 tera electron volts (TeV). The higher beam energy and intensity of Run 3 will allow the ATLAS experiment to push the very limits of its physics research.

Press Statement | 05 Jul 2022

LHC Control Centre

LHC Run 3: physics at record energy starts tomorrow

The Large Hadron Collider is ready to once again start delivering proton collisions to experiments, this time at an unprecedented energy of 13.6 TeV, marking the start of the accelerator’s third run of data taking for physics.

Press Statement | 04 Jul 2022

ATLAS explores the self-interaction of the Higgs boson

In the most recent effort to constrain the Higgs self-coupling constant, ATLAS physicists used the full Run-2 dataset (collected during 2015-2018) to perform a combined study on the production of a single Higgs boson and two Higgs bosons. This single-Higgs analysis was featured in a paper released in Nature today, looking back on 10 years of Higgs boson research at the ATLAS Experiment

Physics Briefing | 04 Jul 2022

10 years of discovery with the Higgs boson

The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN has released its most comprehensive overview of the Higgs boson. The new paper, published in the journal Nature, comes exactly ten years after ATLAS announced the discovery of the Higgs boson. In celebration of this anniversary, a special all-day symposium on the Higgs boson is currently underway at CERN.

Press Statement | 04 Jul 2022

ATLAS and CMS

ATLAS and CMS release results of most comprehensive studies yet of Higgs boson’s properties

The collaborations have used the largest samples of proton–proton collision data recorded so far by the experiments to study the unique particle in unprecedented detail.

News | 04 Jul 2022

ATLAS Pixel detector readies to tackle Run 3

The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is on the eve of a new data harvest with the restart of the LHC for Run 3. The upcoming four-year run will provide a dataset nearly twice the size of what was collected in Run 2 (2015–2018).

Physics Briefing | 01 Jul 2022

Exceptional ATLAS collaborators honoured at the Outstanding Achievement Awards

The ATLAS Collaboration held the 6th Outstanding Achievement Awards Ceremony at CERN on 23 June 2022. Once every two years, these awards give recognition to the invaluable technical work made across the collaboration in all areas.

News | 28 Jun 2022

Harnessing a supercomputer for ATLAS

ATLAS researchers are exploring the potential of High Performance Computing (HPC). HPC harnesses the power of purpose-built supercomputers constructed from specialised hardware, and is used widely in other scientific disciplines.

Experiment Briefing | 02 Jun 2022

ATLAS measures symmetry of Higgs boson decays to tau leptons

The ATLAS Collaboration has just released a new measurement of the CP properties of H→ττ interactions. The study of H→ττ allows researchers to understand the CP-nature of Higgs boson interactions.

Physics Briefing | 20 May 2022

Searches united: ATLAS expands the search for heavy new particles

The ATLAS Collaboration has released a new combined search for heavy vector bosons, which includes 13 individual searches studying different final states. The new combination includes, for the first time, a dedicated search for heavy particles decaying to third-generation leptons (taus).

Physics Briefing | 18 May 2022

ATLAS looks for top quarks going against the current

Using the full Run-2 dataset, the ATLAS Collaboration has published four analyses searching for flavour-changing neutral currents in the production and decay of the top quark. The results study top-quark processes involving all four neutral bosons: the photon, gluon, Z boson and Higgs boson.

Physics Briefing | 16 May 2022

Summary of new ATLAS results from LHCP 2022

The tenth edition of the annual conference on Large Hadron Collider physics (LHCP 2022) begins today in video-conference rooms around the world.

News | 16 May 2022

Looking inside trillion degree matter with ATLAS at the LHC

Stars, planets, animals, plants, you and me – everything that can be directly observed in our Universe is ordinary matter. But the Universe didn’t always look this way. This ATLAS feature describes the quark-gluon plasma, a unique state of matter that existed shortly after the Big Bang. The nature and properties of this matter are being revealed at CERN’s ATLAS Experiment.



Feature | 13 May 2022

Countdown to physics: Beams splash in the ATLAS experiment

After over three years of upgrade and maintenance work, proton beams are back in the Large Hadron Collider! Friday 22 April 2022 marked the start of the LHC’s third operation period (Run 3), which will see a record number of collisions in the ATLAS detector.

News | 28 Apr 2022

Mass matters – but it isn't the only thing!

The ATLAS Collaboration finds evidence of parton mass, colour-charge and radiation-pattern dependence in quark-gluon-plasma induced energy loss.

Physics Briefing | 27 Apr 2022

ATLAS gives new insight into dijet suppression in heavy-ion collisions

At the recent Quark Matter 2022 conference in Krakow, Poland, members of the ATLAS Collaboration presented a new study of “jets” of particles travelling through the QGP. The result provides new insight into dijet suppression due to interactions with the nuclear medium.

Physics Briefing | 22 Apr 2022

ATLAS observes pairs of tau particles in heavy-ion collisions

Today at the Quark Matter 2022 Conference, the ATLAS Collaboration announced the observation of tau-lepton pairs created when particles of light – or photons – interact during lead-ion collisions. The result opens a new avenue for measuring how magnetic the tau lepton is – a property sensitive to new particles beyond the Standard Model.

Physics Briefing | 07 Apr 2022

ATLAS highlights from the Moriond 2022 conference

As one of the most exciting and promising experiments for new crucial discoveries in the field of high-energy particle physics, ATLAS contributed many novel results presented in dedicated talks at the recent Rencontres de Moriond conference.

News | 06 Apr 2022

ATLAS strengthens its search for supersymmetry

Where is all the new physics? Could it be sneaking past the standard searches? ATLAS researchers have developed innovative ways to search for new particles, improving their search programme to ensure they have the best chance of discovering new physics in Run 3 of the LHC.

Physics Briefing | 29 Mar 2022

Search for new physics in Higgs boson decays with displaced photons

The ATLAS Collaboration performed a new search for exotic Higgs-boson decays using the full dataset of 13 TeV proton-proton collisions delivered by the LHC between 2015 and 2018.

Physics Briefing | 28 Mar 2022

One Higgs boson found – could there be more?

Many theories suggest that the Higgs boson discovered in 2012 by the ATLAS Experiment is but the first to be observed from a larger Higgs family. A new ATLAS analysis searches for the presence of a new singly-charged Higgs boson.

Physics Briefing | 24 Mar 2022

ATLAS Live talk: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and the Higgs boson with Dr. David Rousseau

On 31 March 2022 at 8pm CEST, Dr. David Rousseau will give a live public talk on the ATLAS Youtube Channel on the role artificial intelligence plays in particle physics research.

News | 23 Mar 2022

ATLAS reports first observation of single top-photon production

The ATLAS Collaboration announces the first observation of “tqγ production”: the associated production of a single top quark and a photon in proton-proton collisions at the LHC.

Physics Briefing | 15 Mar 2022

ATLAS seeks out unusual signatures of long-lived particles

The ATLAS Collaboration has devised a range of new strategies to look for long-lived particles with various possible characteristics. Four new results from this effort were presented at the recent Lepton-Photon and La Thuile conferences.

Physics Briefing | 14 Mar 2022

Summary of new ATLAS results from 2022 Winter Conferences

The winter conference season is in full swing! 2022 marks the return of full auditoriums and coffee-break chats, as the La Thuile and Rencontres de Moriond conferences welcome participants to venues in the Italian Alps. These are the first large-scale, international particle physics conferences to be held in person in the COVID era – reuniting experimentalists and theorists after almost two years of virtual meetings.

News | 10 Mar 2022

And the ATLAS Thesis Awards go to…

Behind nearly every great ATLAS result lies an outstanding PhD student! Students are a key cohort of the ATLAS Collaboration, making critical contributions to the experiment while working on their degree. Every year, the Collaboration comes together to celebrate their work in the context of the ATLAS Thesis Awards.

News | 08 Mar 2022

ATLAS event selection system readies for LHC Run 3

The ATLAS trigger system operated extremely successfully during Run 1 (2009–2013) and Run 2 (2015–2018) of the LHC. It is now undergoing various upgrades in preparation for the upcoming Run-3 data-taking period, which will see a moderate increase in the rate of collisions inside the experiment.

Experiment Briefing | 28 Feb 2022

Looking for the invisible with the Higgs boson

According to the Standard Model, most particles get their mass through an interaction with the Higgs field. If dark-matter particles acquire their mass in the same way, a Higgs boson created in an LHC collision might sometimes decay into a pair of “invisible” dark-matter particles. The ATLAS Collaboration has released a new search for invisible Higgs-boson decays using the full Run 2 dataset.

Physics Briefing | 17 Feb 2022

ATLAS Live talk: Exploring electroweak phenomena with Dr. Karolos Potamianos

On 17 February 2022 at 8pm CET, Dr. Karolos Potamianos will give a live public talk on the ATLAS Youtube Channel on the study of the electroweak force and the role it plays in the Universe.

News | 08 Feb 2022

ATLAS sees a difference between beauty and charm decays of the Higgs boson

Physicists from the ATLAS Collaboration have combined two measurements of the interaction strength of the Higgs boson with two different pairs of quarks. This allows physicists to test a hypothesis that the Higgs boson interacts with charm quarks (which are second-generation quarks) in the same way it interacts with beauty quarks (third-generation quarks).

Physics Briefing | 01 Feb 2022

Developing the ATLAS End-Cap Toroids: a personal history

Former ATLAS engineer Elwyn Baynham shares his experience as part of the team developing the ATLAS End-Cap Toroids. His story paints a personal picture of the history of these incredible magnets.

Blog | 26 Jan 2022

Upgraded ATLAS Liquid Argon Calorimeter ready for next LHC operation

The ATLAS Collaboration has completed the installation of “Phase-I” upgrades of the Liquid Argon Calorimeter (LAr). The upgrades improve the read-out speed of the calorimeter’s electronics and provide more efficient event-selection capabilities. These improvements will be pivotal for data-taking during the coming high-intensity runs of the LHC.

Experiment Briefing | 25 Jan 2022

ATLAS gives new insight into the internal structure of the proton

The ATLAS Collaboration has just released a new paper combining LHC and HERA data to determine Parton Distribution Functions (PDFs), which describe what fraction of a proton’s momentum is taken by its constituent quarks and gluons.

Physics Briefing | 12 Jan 2022

Discovery channels join forces for detailed investigation of the Higgs boson

The ATLAS Collaboration has released updated measurements of the Higgs boson properties using the full LHC Run-2 dataset (recorded 2015-2018).

Physics Briefing | 11 Jan 2022

Summary of new ATLAS results from Lepton Photon 2021

The 30th International Symposium on Lepton Photon Interactions at High Energies (Lepton Photon 2021) kicks off today. Explore the ATLAS results that will be presented.

News | 10 Jan 2022

Building an ATLAS gingerbread wonderland

When I received an email from the ATLAS outreach coordinators in October 2021, asking if I would help them make an ATLAS-inspired gingerbread village for this year’s card, I couldn’t refuse an opportunity for another fun “Physics Cakes” project.

Blog | 24 Dec 2021

New ATLAS result seeks to unravel the charge–flavour mystery

Could there be another source of asymmetry in the Universe? ATLAS physicists are studying the differences between positively- and negatively-charged electrons and muons, looking for signs of charge–lepton-flavour symmetry breaking.

Physics Briefing | 17 Dec 2021

ATLAS without Frontiers

For several years, the ICTP Physics Without Frontiers (PWF) programme has been heavily involved with outreach activities to inspire, train and educate young and motivated physics students worldwide. Several members of the ATLAS Collaboration very active in this programme.

Blog | 14 Dec 2021

Search for elusive “di-Higgs production” reaches new milestone

According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson can interact with itself, resulting in the simultaneous production of two Higgs bosons ("di-Higgs production"). In a new result, the ATLAS Collaboration combines three di-Higgs decay channels to reach the best limits yet on di-Higgs production.

Physics Briefing | 19 Nov 2021

ATLAS Live talk: Building the Data Haystack with Dr Heather Russell

On 22 November 2021 at 8pm CET, Dr. Heather Russell will give a live public talk on the ATLAS Youtube Channel on the "trigger", the ATLAS event selection system.

News | 18 Nov 2021

Detectors for a new era of ATLAS physics

4 November 2021, Geneva. The ATLAS Experiment at CERN welcomes a brand-new detector: the Muon New Small Wheel system. Its successful installation follows nearly a decade of design and construction, and marks a major milestone in ATLAS’ high-luminosity era.

News | 04 Nov 2021

Teaching established software new tricks

Following several years of development, ATLAS Collaboration has launched a new "multithreaded" release of its analysis software, Athena.

Experiment Briefing | 15 Oct 2021

Bringing new life to ATLAS data

The ATLAS Collaboration is breathing new life into its LHC Run-2 dataset, recorded from 2015 to 2018. Physicists will be reprocessing the entire dataset – nearly 18 PB of collision data – using an updated version of the ATLAS offline analysis software (Athena). Not only will this improve ATLAS physics measurements and searches, it will also position the Collaboration well for the upcoming challenges of Run 3 and beyond.

News | 15 Oct 2021

ATLAS pushes forward the search for a charged Higgs boson

ATLAS physicists Florencia Daneri and Waleed Ahmed share the latest news from the Charge-Higgs@LHC workshop, which took place online August 30-31, 2021.

Blog | 20 Sep 2021

ATLAS Live talk: Studying the top quark at the LHC with Dr Maria Moreno Llácer

On 23 September 2021 at 8pm CEST, Dr. Maria Moreno Llácer will give a live public talk on the ATLAS Youtube Channel on the top quark. She will explain what makes this quark such a unique particle and describe the role it plays in the search for new physics.

News | 17 Sep 2021

Searching for new physics using asymmetric top-quark events

Finding the differences between these types of matter – while extremely challenging – could reveal well-hidden effects that hint at the existence of new particles and interactions. In a new result presented at the TOP 2021 conference, the ATLAS Collaboration probed the heaviest-known elementary particle, the top quark, in search of these effects.

Physics Briefing | 13 Sep 2021

ATLAS highlights from the EPS-HEP 2021 conference

ATLAS’ vibrant physics programme was on full display at EPS-HEP 2021, with members presenting 26 new physics analyses among other key recent results. These were shown in 63 presentations and 45 posters over the five days.

News | 04 Aug 2021

Hunting for forbidden decays of the Z boson

In a new study, the ATLAS Collaboration looked for Z bosons decaying into an electron and an anti-muon, or into a muon and a positron.

Physics Briefing | 03 Aug 2021

ATLAS measures key Higgs boson interaction with high precision

The ATLAS Collaboration releases new measurements of the Higgs-boson decay to tau leptons. The result provides new insight into the “Yukawa coupling”, a key interaction of the Higgs boson.

Physics Briefing | 02 Aug 2021

Two Higgs bosons are better than one

One of the long-term goals of the LHC is to measure the Higgs-boson self-coupling, which in turn can give us clues about the formation of the early Universe. This self-coupling can only be measured directly by studying the production of pairs of Higgs bosons (HH).

Physics Briefing | 30 Jul 2021

Probing new physics with pairs of Higgs bosons

The ATLAS Collaboration has released a new result searching for pairs of Higgs bosons (HH) produced by new particles. The Higgs bosons would then each decay into pairs of bottom (b) quarks – known as the '4b decay channel'.

Physics Briefing | 28 Jul 2021

ATLAS reports first observation of WWW production

The ATLAS Collaboration announces the first observation of “WWW production”: the simultaneous creation of three massive W bosons in high-energy LHC collisions.

Physics Briefing | 26 Jul 2021

Summary of new ATLAS results from EPS-HEP 2021

The European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics (EPS-HEP 2021) kicks off today. Explore the ATLAS results that will be presented.

News | 26 Jul 2021

The Last Quark

Twenty-five years on from the discovery of the top quark, ATLAS physicist Richard Hawkings discusses the history of the particle's discovery, its place in the Standard Model and what it has still yet to tell us.

Feature | 23 Jul 2021

Shining light on the strong interaction: ATLAS measures photon pair production

What can particles of light – photons – tell us about the inner workings of the Standard Model? A new paper from the ATLAS Collaboration measures pairs of photons to improve the understanding of a fundamental force of Nature – the strong force – and thus scrutinise the theoretical models that underpin high-energy physics research.

Physics Briefing | 22 Jul 2021

Live from the ATLAS experiment

In celebration of the lowering of the first New Small Wheel detector, CERN is hosting a 360° live event from the ATLAS cavern! Tune in on Thursday 15 July at 5pm CEST.

News | 14 Jul 2021

Studying “Little Bangs”: exotic collisions probe the size of quark-gluon plasma

A new result from the ATLAS Collaboration studies the interactions of photons – particles of light – with lead nuclei at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Using new data collection techniques, physicists revealed an unexpected similarity to the experimental signatures of the quark–gluon plasma.

Physics Briefing | 13 Jul 2021

ATLAS Live talk: Deciphering the Higgs boson with Dr Hongtao Yang

On 1 July 2021, Dr. Hongtao Yang will be giving a live public talk, sharing the story of the Higgs boson's discovery by the ATLAS and CMS experiments. He will explain what ATLAS physicists have learned about this fascinating particle so far, and describe the next steps in its exploration.

News | 29 Jun 2021

ATLAS celebrates results of 1000 collision papers

The ATLAS Collaboration celebrates the creativity, wealth and scientific impact enshrined in its 1000 papers using LHC collision data. This work – together with that carried out by its sister experiments at the LHC – represents a diversified physics programme that is unprecedented and unequalled in physics research to date.

News | 18 Jun 2021

The hunt for higgsinos reaches new limits

The ATLAS Collaboration has released three new searches for "higgsinos" - the super-partner of the Higgs boson.

Physics Briefing | 10 Jun 2021

Heavyweight champions: a search for new heavy W’ bosons with the ATLAS detector

A new search from the ATLAS Collaboration, released this week at the Large Hadron Collider Physics conference (LHCP 2021), sets limits on the mass of the W’ boson.

Physics Briefing | 09 Jun 2021

ATLAS measures the polarisation of top quarks and antiquarks

In a new result presented by the ATLAS Collaboration, physicists have measured – for the first time – the full polarisation vectors for both top quarks and antiquarks.

Physics Briefing | 08 Jun 2021

New search for charming decay of the Higgs boson

At the LHCP2021 conference, the ATLAS Collaboration presents a new direct search for the decay of the Higgs boson to charm quarks. Observing this decay would give physicists new insight into the Higgs boson’s relationship with the second generation of matter particles.

Physics Briefing | 07 Jun 2021

Summary of new ATLAS results from LHCP 2021

The ninth annual conference on Large Hadron Collider physics (LHCP 2021) begins today in video-conference rooms around the world.

News | 07 Jun 2021

ATLAS Live talk: How to study matter at a trillion degrees with Dr. Anne Sickles

Soon after the Big Bang, the Universe was too hot for normal matter to exist. Instead, it was made up of an extremely hot liquid of quarks and gluons: the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). In this live talk, Dr. Anne Marie Sickles explains how physicists at the ATLAS experiment are studying the QGP and what they've have learned.

News | 05 Jun 2021

First ATLAS New Small Wheel nears completion

On Friday 28 May 2021, teams of physicists and engineers installed the final "wedge" of the first ATLAS New Small Wheel detector. This was an important milestone for the Collaboration, in preparation for the wheel’s installation in the ATLAS cavern later this summer.

News | 04 Jun 2021

ATLAS Live talk: From Data to Discovery with Dr. James Catmore

Making a scientific breakthrough in 2021 requires more than just a microscope – most scientists rely on powerful computers and ingenious software to carry out their research. In this live talk, Dr. James Catmore explains the advanced computing and software techniques used by the ATLAS Experiment.

News | 10 May 2021

Supporting talented students with the ATLAS PhD Grant

On 13 April 2021, the recipients of this year's ATLAS PhD Grant were celebrated in an online ceremony. These talented and motivated students will receive 1.5 years of funding for their studies at CERN, giving them the opportunity to enhance their doctoral studies in a one-of-a-kind research environment.

News | 04 May 2021

In conversation with John Rutherfoord, a leading designer of the ATLAS Calorimeter

John P. Rutherfoord is a professor at the University of Arizona and a long-standing member of the ATLAS Collaboration. His extensive career has taken him from searching for the Upsilon particle at Fermilab to CERN to leading the design and development of the ATLAS Forward Calorimeter.

Portrait | 22 Apr 2021

Building community in virtual events

Since 2017, the ATLAS Early Career Scientist Board (ECSB) and Analysis Software Tutorial organisers have been teaming up to run a week-long introductory event for new ATLAS members. Induction Day welcomes new members to the collaboration by giving them an overview of the plethora of activities that take place within the ATLAS Collaboration.

Blog | 20 Apr 2021

ATLAS highlights from the Moriond 2021 conferences

The ATLAS Collaboration presented a host of brand-new results at Moriond spanning a broad range of subjects, from further tests of the Standard Model to searches for new phenomena motivated by as-yet unresolved mysteries of particle physics.

News | 02 Apr 2021

Twice the Higgs, twice the challenge

In the post-Higgs discovery era, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have been hard at work studying the Higgs boson’s properties. One property that remains to be experimentally verified is whether the Higgs boson can couple to itself (self-coupling).

Physics Briefing | 29 Mar 2021

ATLAS finds further confirmation of evidence for four top quark process

In a new result released this week, the ATLAS Collaboration studied the production of four top quarks at once in LHC collisions. This is the heaviest particle final state ever seen at the LHC, and provides physicists with a unique opportunity to study the top quark’s relationship to the Higgs boson.

Physics Briefing | 24 Mar 2021

Better late than never: ATLAS searches for late-decaying new particles

A new result from the ATLAS Collaboration – debuted at the virtual Moriond Electroweak conference – sets itself apart from more traditional LHC searches. Typically, physicists will look for new particles produced in LHC collisions that immediately decay to known or invisible particles. This analysis, in contrast, looks for new particles that live for roughly a hundred nanoseconds or more before decaying.

Physics Briefing | 23 Mar 2021

Deeper insight into Higgs boson production using W bosons

The Higgs boson reveals its properties to the outside world twice: during production and decay. ATLAS’ new result studies the Higgs boson at both of these moments, looking at its production via two different methods and its subsequent decay into two W bosons.

Physics Briefing | 22 Mar 2021

Summary of new ATLAS results from Moriond 2021

Since 1966, Les Rencontres de Moriond has united experimentalists and theorists for weeks of scientific discussion. 2021 is no exception – but instead of in-person chats over coffee in La Thuile (Italy), physicists will be sharing their new findings in online meetings.

News | 21 Mar 2021

The supersymmetric bottom quark and its friends

The special status of the top and bottom quarks makes them key players in the search for phenomena not foreseen by the Standard Model. New ATLAS results set strong constraints on the production of supersymmetric bottom quarks and of possible dark-matter particles.

Physics Briefing | 16 Mar 2021

Studying top quarks at high and not-so-high energies

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is famous for colliding protons at world-record energies – but sometimes it pays to dial down the energy and see what happens under less extreme conditions.

Physics Briefing | 11 Mar 2021

The power of position: aligning the ATLAS muon spectrometer

In new results released this week, ATLAS physicists describe novel techniques used to accurately align the muon spectrometer.

Experiment Briefing | 04 Mar 2021

ATLAS: now under new management

The ATLAS Collaboration welcomes new management this month, with Andreas Hoecker (CERN) taking the lead as Spokesperson for the experiment.

News | 02 Mar 2021

Virtual Meet and Eat participants

Planning an event during a pandemic

At the ATLAS Early Career Scientist Board (ECSB), we have also had to adapt in order to best represent and assist the early career scientists in our collaboration. One of the biggest changes was moving all of our events in the second half of 2020 to be entirely virtual.

Blog | 19 Feb 2021

Students step into the limelight: ATLAS awards excellent PhD theses

ATLAS PhD students are a key cohort of the Collaboration, making unique and crucial contributions to the experiment while working on their degree. Every year, their work is celebrated in the context of the ATLAS Thesis Awards.

News | 17 Feb 2021

ATLAS recognises the outstanding achievements of Collaboration members

The 2020 ATLAS Outstanding Achievement Awards ceremony was held online on 11 February 2021. Established in 2014, the awards recognise outstanding contributions in support of the ATLAS experiment, covering all areas except physics analysis.

News | 16 Feb 2021

ATLAS finds evidence of a rare Higgs boson Dalitz decay to two leptons and a photon

ATLAS finds first evidence of the Higgs boson decaying to two leptons and a photon. This is one of the rarest Higgs boson decays yet seen at the LHC, with striking features that presented unique challenges for the ATLAS experiment.

Physics Briefing | 02 Feb 2021

Teaching university students with real ATLAS data

ATLAS PhD student Meirin Oan Evans explores how the University of Sussex is incorporating ATLAS Open Data into their teaching – and shares his experience using this incredible resource.

Blog | 27 Jan 2021

2020: an unprecedented year in review

Despite the huge challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, last year saw excellent successes for the ATLAS Collaboration, including first-of-a-kind physics results and great headway made on detector upgrades.

News | 06 Jan 2021

Studying the Higgs boson in its most common – yet uncommonly challenging – decay channel

New results from the ATLAS Collaboration focus on different production modes of the Higgs boson decaying into b-quarks, capitalising on the power of machine learning to better discriminate this particular process from other proton collision events.

Physics Briefing | 01 Dec 2020

ATLAS Live talk: How elementary particles are detected with Prof. Daniela Bortoletto

Journey into the ATLAS Experiment! On Thursday 26th November, Prof. Daniela Bortoletto gave a live public talk on Youtube describing how particle detectors like ATLAS find elementary particles.

News | 27 Nov 2020

ATLAS releases new open software

The ATLAS Collaboration has just released a collection of 200 software packages that make up the Trigger and Data Acquisition System (TDAQ). With this new release, most ATLAS software is now open – reinforcing the Collaboration’s ongoing commitment to open science.

News | 20 Nov 2020

Refining the picture of the Higgs boson

A new result from the ATLAS Collaboration, released for the Higgs 2020 conference, aims at enriching the Higgs picture by studying its WW* decays.

Physics Briefing | 19 Nov 2020

ATLAS Live talk: Searching for Dark Matter with Dr. Christian Ohm

Dark Matter plays a crucial role in the evolution of our Universe. On Thursday 29th October, Dr. Christian Ohm gave a live public talk on Youtube on the extraordinary mystery of Dark Matter.

News | 31 Oct 2020

ATLAS uses the Higgs boson as a tool to search for Dark Matter

One of the great unexplained mysteries is the nature of dark matter. So far, its existence has only been established through gravitational effects observed in space; no dark-matter particles with the needed properties have (yet) been detected. Could the Higgs boson be the key to their discovery?

Physics Briefing | 29 Oct 2020

Higgs boson probes for new phenomena

ATLAS scientists are implementing a new strategy in the search for physics beyond the Standard Model – one that combines measurements across the full spectrum of the Collaboration's research programme.

Physics Briefing | 28 Oct 2020

Leptons at a distance: a new search for long-lived particles

ATLAS researchers are broadening their extensive search programme to look for more unusual signatures of unknown physics, such as long-lived particles. A theory that naturally motivates long-lived particles is supersymmetry (SUSY). A new search from the ATLAS Collaboration – released this week for the 5th International Conference on Particle Physics and Astrophysics (ICPPA-2020) – looks for the superpartners of the electron, muon and tau lepton

Physics Briefing | 07 Oct 2020

Unraveling Nature's secrets: vector boson scattering at the LHC

In 2017, the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations announced the detection of a never-before-observed process: vector boson scattering.

Feature | 22 Sep 2020

Exploring the “coolest” mock-up

It was in 2014, just a few months after my transition from ALICE to ATLAS, that I saw the mock-up for the first time: a full-scale wooden reproduction of the central portion of the ATLAS experiment, measuring some 8 metres high and wide.

Blog | 10 Sep 2020

Z bosons zoom through quark–gluon plasma as jets quench

With new data from the LHC, ATLAS physicists have measured jet-quenching phenomena in the quark–gluon plasma with help of Z bosons.

Physics Briefing | 25 Aug 2020

ATLAS highlights presented at the world's largest particle-physics conference

As major players in the field of particle physics, the LHC collaborations contributed many new results, most of which exploited the full Run-2 dataset, recorded in 2015 to 2018. ATLAS physicists contributed 35 new results, and gave 85 talks in the parallel and plenary sessions. Their contributions spanned a wide range of topics, from precision measurements and searches for new phenomena to detector performance and R&D, as well as diversity and outreach.

News | 08 Aug 2020

Rare phenomenon observed by ATLAS features the LHC as a high-energy photon collider

During the International Conference on High-Energy Physics (ICHEP 2020), the ATLAS Collaboration presented the first observation of photon collisions producing pairs of W bosons, elementary particles that carry the weak force, one of the four fundamental forces. The result demonstrates a new way of using the LHC, namely as a high-energy photon collider directly probing electroweak interactions. It confirms one of the main predictions of electroweak theory – that force carriers can interact with themselves – and provides new ways to probe it.

Press Statement | 05 Aug 2020

ATLAS observes W-boson pair production from light colliding with light

The ATLAS Collaboration has announced the first observation of two W bosons produced from the scattering of two photons — particles of light – at the International Conference on High-Energy Physics (ICHEP 2020).

Physics Briefing | 05 Aug 2020

CERN experiments announce first indications of a rare Higgs boson process

The ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN announce new results which show that the Higgs boson decays into two muons. These new results have pivotal importance for fundamental physics because they indicate for the first time that the Higgs boson interacts with second-generation elementary particles.

Press Statement | 03 Aug 2020

New ATLAS result marks milestone in the test of Standard Model properties

The ATLAS Collaboration has released a new study into a key building block of matter: leptons. This type of particle comes in three different families (flavours) and, according to the Standard Model, should follow strict rules. For instance, except for their mass, leptons of different flavours have identical properties – a feature known as lepton flavour universality. This was recently corroborated by a key measurement of the W-boson decay rates into leptons by the ATLAS Collaboration.

Physics Briefing | 03 Aug 2020

New measurements of the Higgs boson find strength in unity

Physicists can study Higgs-boson couplings in several ways: by measuring the rates of different Higgs boson production mechanisms and decays, and also by studying the particle’s kinematic properties. The ATLAS Collaboration has just presented precise new measurements of these key quantities. Several of these measurements were updated to use the full LHC Run 2 dataset (2015–2018), to provide the best precision to date.

Physics Briefing | 31 Jul 2020

Looking forward: ATLAS measures proton scattering when light turns into matter

Today, at the International Conference for High Energy Physics (ICHEP 2020), the ATLAS Collaboration announced first results using the ATLAS Forward Proton (AFP) spectrometer. With this instrument, physicists directly observed and measured the long sought-after prediction of proton scattering when particles of light turn into matter.

Physics Briefing | 30 Jul 2020

ATLAS probes interactions between heavyweights of the Standard Model

In the contest for the heaviest known elementary particle, the top quark and Z boson rank first and third, respectively. When a proton–proton collision produces a top-quark pair together with a Z boson – a process known as ttZ production – their total mass can reach an impressive 440 GeV! The discovery of this highly energetic process thus required the record collision energy and rate of the LHC; no previous collider could come close.

Physics Briefing | 30 Jul 2020

Jetting into the dark side: a precision search for dark matter

The nature of dark matter remains one of the great unsolved puzzles of fundamental physics. Many theoretical scenarios postulate that dark matter particles could be produced in the intense high-energy proton–proton collisions of the LHC. While the dark matter would escape the ATLAS detector unseen, it could occasionally be accompanied by a visible jet of particles radiated from the interaction point. Today, at the International Conference in High-Energy Physics (ICHEP 2020), ATLAS presented a new search for novel phenomena in collision events with jets and high missing transverse momentum (MET).

Physics Briefing | 27 Jul 2020

Summary of new ATLAS results for ICHEP 2020

Since the 1950s, one conference has stayed circled in red on every physicist's calendar: the International Conference on High­-Energy Physics (ICHEP). The fortieth edition of ICHEP kicks off today, bringing together particle physicists, astrophysicists and accelerator scientists to share the latest news in their fields. Originally planned as an in-person event in Prague, ICHEP2020 will instead be the very first all-virtual edition of the conference.

News | 27 Jul 2020

ATLAS one step closer in the search for rare Higgs boson decays to muons

The ATLAS Collaboration has released a new paper on the search for the Higgs-boson decay to a pair of muons. The new study uses the entire dataset collected by the ATLAS experiment during Run 2 of the LHC (2015–2018) to give a first hint of this elusive process.

Physics Briefing | 23 Jul 2020

Summary of ATLAS results presented at BOOST 2020

The first all-virtual BOOST workshop kicks off today, bringing together experts from the LHC experiments and the theory community. This is the twelfth conference on "Boosted Object Phenomenology, Reconstruction and Searches in High-Energy Physics" (BOOST 2020), hosting plenary-style talks and virtual poster presentations on the latest developments in hadronic physics.

News | 20 Jul 2020

Keeping the ATLAS Inner Detector in perfect alignment

How do you track a particle’s trajectory when your detector keeps moving? What if you find slight biases in your detector’s measurements? These were the challenges faced by the ATLAS Inner Detector during Run 2 of the LHC (2015–2018). Located at the heart of the experiment, the Inner Detector provides efficient and precise measurements of charged-particle tracks. In a new paper released today, physicists describe the complex solutions they developed to align the Inner Detector, ensuring the continued accuracy of the experiment.

Experiment Briefing | 16 Jul 2020

Connecting during COVID-19: Updates from the (physically but not socially distanced) Early Career Scientist Board

As a community, we need to stay in contact, remain motivated and learn from each other's experiences. The work-from-home situation is one to which everyone has to adjust, balancing personal and professional lives, while accepting the effect of the ongoing pandemic on society. Despite these challenges, the ATLAS Early Career Scientist Board (ECSB) developed a series of events to boost the morale of the ECS community and to help people connect, even when they are sitting miles away from each other. I joined the ATLAS ECSB in March 2020, and to be honest, it has felt great to be a part of something that makes a difference in people’s lives – even if it’s just to laugh together.

Blog | 01 Jul 2020

You want me to present a poster…. remotely?

Though an academic affair, poster sessions are also an opportunity to network and socialise with colleagues. Typically, a large hall will be filled with rows of poster stands, their authors standing anxiously beside them, anticipating whatever question may be posed by a passer-by. Finger food and drinks are usually served. Sometimes these encounters lead to in-depth discussions about a new result but, more often than not, they just serve as ice-breakers for would-be colleagues, or a kind of “physics buffet” for conference attendees to sample subjects outside their specialization. Could such an experience be recreated in an online conference?

Blog | 22 Jun 2020

In conversation with Claudia Gemme, an influential voice in ATLAS detector upgrades

Claudia Gemme, researcher at INFN in Genova, has had a varied career with the ATLAS Collaboration. From her work on the construction and commissioning of the ATLAS Pixel detector, to a career in physics analysis and the ATLAS Publication Committee, she now leads a key upgrade of the ATLAS detector: the ATLAS Inner Tracker (ITk).

Portrait | 15 Jun 2020

Physicists gather online for the Large Hadron Collider Physics conference

The eighth Large Hadron Collider Physics (LHCP 2020) conference concluded today, 30 May, in Zoom rooms around the world. Instead of descending on Paris to meet, particle physicists held the conference fully online for the first time. As a result, LHCP 2020 welcomed some 1300 registered participants – nearly triple its previous record of attendance. A bumper crop of new ATLAS results were prepared for the conference covering a broad range of topics, from precise measurements of the Standard Model to novel searches for new physics. These new results probed the full dataset collected during Run 2 of the LHC (2015-2018) – a proven gold mine for ATLAS’ rich physics programme.

News | 30 May 2020

ATLAS Live talk: Physics Through the Looking Glass with Dr. Laura Jeanty

On Thursday 28 May, Dr. Laura Jeanty gave a public talk live on YouTube on the underlying symmetries of the Universe, and how they are studied by particle physics experiments.

News | 29 May 2020

New ATLAS result addresses long-standing tension in the Standard Model

This week, at the LHCP 2020 conference, the ATLAS Collaboration presented a precise measurement of lepton flavour universality using a brand-new technique. Physicists examined collision events where pairs of top quarks decay to pairs of W bosons, and subsequently into leptons. They then measured the relative probability that this lepton is a muon or a tau-lepton – a ratio known as R(τ/μ). According to the Standard Model, R(τ/μ) should be unity – but there has been long-standing tension with this prediction, ever since it was measured at the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider in the 1990s.

Physics Briefing | 28 May 2020

Fantastic decays and where to find them

Supersymmetry offers an elegant solution to the limitations of the Standard Model, extending it to give each elementary particle a “superpartner” with different spin properties. Yet SUSY also contains interactions that would cause phenomena not observed in nature, such as the decay of protons. This has traditionally been avoided by requiring the conservation of a property known as “R-parity” (or “matter-parity”), which incorporates the baryon number, lepton number and spin. ATLAS physicists are also considering SUSY models with R-parity violation (or “RPV”), which would allow the lightest SUSY particle to be observed decaying directly into Standard Model particles.

Physics Briefing | 27 May 2020

ATLAS finds evidence of spectacular four-top quark production

In a new result released today, the ATLAS Collaboration announced strong evidence of the production of four top quarks. This rare Standard Model process is expected to occur only once for every 70 thousand pairs of top quarks created at the LHC and has proven extremely difficult to measure.

Physics Briefing | 26 May 2020

ATLAS measures light scattering on light and constrains axion-like particles

Light-by-light scattering is a very rare phenomenon in which two photons – particles of light – interact, producing another pair of photons. Direct observation of this process at high energy had proven elusive for decades, until it was first seen by the ATLAS Collaboration in 2016 and established in 2019. In a new measurement, ATLAS physicists are using light-by-light scattering to search for a hyped phenomenon beyond the Standard Model of particle physics: axion-like particles.

Physics Briefing | 25 May 2020

Summary of new ATLAS results from LHCP 2020

The eighth annual conference on Large Hadron Collider physics (LHCP 2020) kicks off today in video-conference rooms around the world. This week-long event is usually an opportunity for physicists from around the world to meet in person and share the latest news from their LHC experiments. This year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference is being held online.

News | 25 May 2020

Machine learning qualitatively changes the search for new particles

The ATLAS Collaboration is exploring novel ways to search for new phenomena. Alongside an extensive research programme often inspired by specific theoretical models – ranging from quantum black holes to supersymmetry – physicists are applying new model-independent methods to broaden their searches. ATLAS has just released the first model-independent search for new particles using a novel technique called “weak supervision”.

Physics Briefing | 13 May 2020

Probing Dark Matter with the Higgs boson

Could the Higgs boson decay into dark matter? As dark matter does not interact directly with the ATLAS detector, physicists look for signs of “invisible particles”, inferred through momentum conservation of the proton–proton collision products. The ATLAS Collaboration searched the full LHC Run-2 dataset, setting the strongest limits on the Higgs boson decaying to invisible dark-matter particles to date.

Physics Briefing | 21 Apr 2020

ATLAS searches for rare Higgs boson decays into a photon and a Z boson

The ATLAS Collaboration has just released a new result searching for the Higgs-boson decay to a Z boson and a photon. This result uses the full LHC Run-2 dataset, analysing almost four times as many Higgs-boson events as the previous ATLAS result.

Physics Briefing | 21 Apr 2020

Novel probes of the strong force: precision jet substructure and the Lund jet plane

A hallmark of the strong force at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the dramatic production of collimated jets of particles when quarks and gluons scatter at high energies. Particle physicists have studied jets for decades to learn about the structure of quantum chromodynamics – or QCD, the theory of the strong interaction – across a wide range of energy scales. Recent theoretical and experimental advancements in their study is now allowing ATLAS physicists to test the strong force in new ways.

Physics Briefing | 19 Apr 2020

Searching for new sources of matter–antimatter symmetry breaking in Higgs boson interaction with top quarks

When a particle is transformed into its antiparticle and its spatial coordinates inverted, the laws of physics are required to stay the same – or so we thought. This symmetry – known as “CP symmetry” (Charge conjugation and Parity symmetry) – was considered to be exact until 1964, when a study of the kaon particle system led to the discovery of “CP violation”. In a new result presented today, the ATLAS Collaboration performed a direct test of the CP properties of the interaction between the Higgs boson and top quarks. The result is based on an analysis of the full LHC Run-2 dataset, looking at collision events where the Higgs boson is produced in association with one or two top quarks, and in turn decays into two photons.

Physics Briefing | 07 Apr 2020

Measuring the beauty of the Higgs boson

Two years ago, the Higgs boson was observed decaying to a pair of beauty-quarks (H→bb), moving its study from the “discovery era” to the “measurement era”. In new results presented today, the ATLAS Collaboration studied the full LHC Run-2 dataset to give an updated measurement of H→bb, where the Higgs boson is produced in association with a vector boson (W or Z).

Physics Briefing | 07 Apr 2020

ATLAS Collaboration enters active “Safe Mode”

The global health crisis caused by COVID-19 has impacted every aspect of life. Much of the world’s population are sheltering in place, with ATLAS Collaboration members similarly affected.

News | 02 Apr 2020

ATLAS PhD Grant continues its support of up-and-coming talents

At an award ceremony in the Globe of Science and Innovation, the ATLAS Collaboration celebrated the new recipients of the ATLAS PhD Grant: Prajita Bhattarai, Hassnae El Jarrari and Albert Kong.

News | 11 Mar 2020

ATLAS Thesis Awards: And the winners are…

With over 5000 members in 181 institutions, contributions to the ATLAS Collaboration can take a variety of forms. Every February, ATLAS celebrates the outstanding work of one particular set of members: its PhD students.

News | 03 Mar 2020

Serving up new winter recipes with the ATLAS Early Career Scientist Board

In 2019, I joined the ATLAS Early Career Scientist Board (ECSB): a special advisory group dedicated to assisting the ATLAS Collaboration in building an environment where the full scientific potential of scientists at the start of their career can be realised. The board organises several activities for the ATLAS community (you may have seen all of our summer activities described in this blog). I was actively involved in the winter activities. They were all fantastic experiences to improve social relationships in a 5000-people collaboration.

Blog | 28 Feb 2020

25 years on: a single top quark partners with the Z boson

A quarter-century after its discovery, physicists at the ATLAS Experiment are gaining new insight into the heaviest-known particle: the top quark. The huge amount of data collected during Run 2 of the LHC (2015-2018) has allowed physicists to study rare production processes of the top quark in great detail, including its production in association with other heavy elementary particles.

Physics Briefing | 21 Feb 2020

Searching for natural supersymmetry using novel techniques

In new results presented today at CERN, the ATLAS Experiment’s search for supersymmetry (SUSY) reached new levels of sensitivity. The results examine a popular SUSY extension studied at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC): the “Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model” (MSSM), which includes the minimum required number of new particles and interactions to make predictions at the LHC energies.

Physics Briefing | 18 Feb 2020

ATLAS Experiment releases 13 TeV Open Data for Science Education

The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN has just released the first open dataset from the Large Hadron Collider’s (LHC) highest-energy run at 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV). The new release is specially developed for science education, underlining the Collaboration’s long-standing commitment to students and teachers using open-access ATLAS data and related tools.

Press Statement | 10 Feb 2020

In conversation with Philippe Farthouat, a driving force behind ATLAS electronics

Philippe Farthouat has played a critical role in electronics development since the beginning of ATLAS, from design and prototyping to testing and installation. He has been the overall ATLAS electronics coordinator since 1999.

Portrait | 14 Jan 2020

Sharing the Excitement of ATLAS

This past week, I grabbed a last-minute opportunity to wander about and take in the beauty of my favourite particle physics detector. Located 100 meters under the French/Swiss border near Geneva, ATLAS is always a marvel to see and to explore. Although I have hosted hundreds of visits by its side, I never tire of the view and inevitably pull out my phone or camera to photograph it, yet again.

Blog | 22 Dec 2019

New open release streamlines interactions with theoretical physicists

What if you could test a new theory against LHC data? Better yet, what if the expert knowledge needed to do this was captured in a convenient format? This tall order is now on its way from the ATLAS Collaboration, with the first open release of full analysis likelihoods from an LHC experiment.

News | 12 Dec 2019

African scientists take on new ATLAS machine-learning challenge

Cirta is a new machine-learning challenge for high-energy physics on Zindi, the Africa-based data-science challenge platform. Launched this autumn at the International Conference on High Energy and Astroparticle Physics (TIC-HEAP), Constantine, Algeria, Cirta challenges participants to provide machine-learning solutions for identifying particles in LHC experiment data.

News | 20 Nov 2019

ATLAS probes the quark-gluon plasma in a new study of photo-produced muon pairs

The electromagnetic fields of the Lorentz-contracted lead nuclei in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC act as intense sources of high-energy photons, or particles of light. This environment allows physicists to study photon-induced scattering processes, that can not be studied elsewhere. A key process examined by ATLAS physicists involves the annihilation of photons into pairs of oppositely charged muons. The ATLAS Collaboration recently released a new, comprehensive measurement of this process.

Physics Briefing | 19 Nov 2019

Ensuring high-quality data at ATLAS

During Run 2, ATLAS achieved an exceptionally high data-quality efficiency for a hadron collider, with over 95% of the 13 TeV proton-proton collision data certified for physics analysis. In a new paper released today, the ATLAS data quality team summarises how this excellent result was achieved.

Physics Briefing | 13 Nov 2019

In conversation with Masaya Ishino, a key player behind ATLAS' successful Run 2

Masaya Ishino is a researcher and professor with the University of Tokyo. He joined the ATLAS Collaboration in 2001, and has been instrumental to the development, construction and operation of the muon spectrometer. Masaya was elected ATLAS Run Coordinator in 2017, playing a key role in the record-breaking Run 2 operation.

Portrait | 07 Oct 2019

ATLAS highlights from TOP2019

As the heaviest elementary particle, the top quark is appropriately named. It is ideally suited for precision measurements that test the limits of our understanding and could provide indirect hints at new physics. Physicists from around the world gathered in Beijing, China, last week at the annual TOP2019 conference to exchange the latest news, results and ideas on the top quark. For the ATLAS collaboration, TOP2019 proved a great success, with several excellent talks and posters presented by its members.

News | 04 Oct 2019

Record crowds at ATLAS for the CERN Open Days

On 14-15 September 2019, CERN opened its doors to the public for its first Open Days since 2013. This massive event saw over 75,000 visitors descend upon the Organization – many of whom eagerly anticipated underground visits to the LHC and its experiments.

News | 23 Sep 2019

New ATLAS members, welcome on board

This summer was rich with events regularly organised by the ATLAS Early Career Scientists Board (ECSB): Induction Day, Career Q&A and the Ice Cream event. The ECSB is a special advisory group dedicated to assisting the ATLAS Collaboration in building an environment where the full scientific potential of young scientists can be realised. It consists of seven early career scientists, representing various career levels, nationalities, genders and home institutions. I have been in the thick of things as a new member of the ECSB and had a lot of new experiences. Each event was full of fantastic people and brought to its participants tonnes of useful information.

Blog | 18 Sep 2019

ATLAS Experiment welcomes the public for CERN Open Days

The ATLAS Experiment will be opening its doors to the world on 14 and 15 September 2019 for the CERN Open Days. This weekend-long event will be an exciting opportunity for members of the public to explore the world’s largest particle-physics laboratory – host to the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – and take part in over 100 activities around the CERN campus.

News | 06 Sep 2019

Searching for Higgs boson interactions with the lightest charged lepton

Does the Higgs boson follow all of the rules set by the Standard Model? Since discovering the particle in 2012, the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations have been hard at work studying the behaviour of the Higgs boson. Any unexpected observations could be a sign of new physics beyond the Standard Model.

Physics Briefing | 06 Aug 2019

ATLAS delivers new direct measurement of the top-quark decay width with improved precision

As the heaviest known particle, the top quark plays a key role in studies of fundamental interactions. Due to its short lifetime, the top quark decays before it can turn into a hadron. Thus, its properties are preserved and transferred to its decay products, which can in turn be measured in high-energy physics experiments. Such studies provide an excellent testing ground for the Standard Model and may provide clues for new physics.

Physics Briefing | 06 Aug 2019

ATLAS releases new search for strong supersymmetry

New particles sensitive to the strong interaction might be produced in abundance in the proton-proton collisions generated by the LHC – provided that they aren’t too heavy. These particles could be the partners of gluons and quarks predicted by supersymmetry (SUSY), a proposed extension of the Standard Model of particle physics that would expand its predictive power to include much higher energies. In the simplest scenarios, these “gluinos” and “squarks” would be produced in pairs, and decay directly into quarks and a new stable neutral particle (the “neutralino”), which would not interact with the ATLAS detector. The neutralino could be the main constituent of dark matter.

Physics Briefing | 05 Aug 2019

Zooming in on top-quark production

As the heaviest known elementary particle, the top quark has a special place in LHC physics. Top quark-antiquark pairs are copiously produced in collisions recorded by the ATLAS detector, providing a rich testing ground for theoretical models of particle collisions at the highest accessible energies. Any deviations between measurements and predictions could point to shortcomings in the theory – or first hints of something completely new.

Physics Briefing | 05 Aug 2019

A golden era of exploration: ATLAS highlights from EPS-HEP 2019

Eight years of operation. Over 10,000 trillion high-energy proton collisions. One critical new particle discovery. Countless new insights into our universe. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been breaking records since data-taking began in 2010 – and yet, for ATLAS and its fellow LHC experiments, a golden era of exploration is only just beginning.

News | 20 Jul 2019

New milestone reached in the study of electroweak symmetry breaking

In the Standard Model of particle physics, elementary particles acquire their masses by interacting with the Higgs field. This process is governed by a delicate mechanism: electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB). Although EWSB was first proposed in 1964, it remains among the least understood phenomena of the Standard Model as a large dataset of high-energy particle collisions is required to probe it.

Physics Briefing | 15 Jul 2019

Exploring the Higgs boson “discovery channels"

This week, at the European Physical Society Conference on High-Energy Physics (EPS-HEP) in Ghent, Belgium, the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN released new measurements of Higgs boson properties using the full LHC Run-2 dataset. Critically, the new results examine two of the Higgs boson decays that led to the particle’s discovery in 2012: H→ZZ*→4ℓ, where the Higgs boson decays into two Z bosons, in turn decaying into four leptons (electrons or muons); and H → γγ, where the Higgs boson decays directly into two photons.

Physics Briefing | 12 Jul 2019

Double the Higgs for double the difficulty

A key interaction not yet observed by LHC experiments is the production of “double Higgs”. The Standard Model predicts that the Higgs field can interact with itself to create a Higgs boson pair. The rate with which this happens is critical, as it allows physicists to directly probe the potential energy of the Higgs field, which is responsible for mass of particles. Deviations from the expectation would be a strong hint of new physics.

Physics Briefing | 11 Jul 2019

ATLAS searches for rare Higgs boson decays into muon pairs

Today, at the European Physical Society Conference on High-Energy Physics (EPS-HEP) in Ghent, Belgium, the ATLAS Collaboration released a new preliminary result searching for Higgs boson decays to a muon and antimuon pair (H → μμ). The new, more sensitive result uses the full Run-2 dataset, analysing almost twice as many Higgs boson events as the previous ATLAS result.

Physics Briefing | 11 Jul 2019

ATLAS finds evidence of charge asymmetry in top-quark pairs

Among the most intriguing particles studied by the ATLAS collaboration is the top quark. As the heaviest known fundamental particle, it plays a unique role in the Standard Model of particle physics and – perhaps – in yet unseen physics beyond the Standard Model. A new ATLAS result, presented today at the European Physical Society Conference on High-Energy Physics (EPS-HEP) in Ghent, Belgium, examines the full Run 2 dataset to find evidence of charge asymmetry in top-quark pair events, with a significance of four standard deviations.

Physics Briefing | 11 Jul 2019

Summary of new ATLAS results for EPS-HEP 2019

ATLAS physicists are in Ghent, Belgium, this week for the European Physical Society Conference on High-Energy Physics (EPS-HEP) 2019. Since its establishment in 1971, the EPS-HEP conference has brought together the high-energy particle physics community every two years to discuss the latest results in field. This year, several hundred physicists from around the world are expected to attend.

News | 11 Jul 2019

In conversation with Zachary Marshall, a leading voice in the search for new physics

Simulation and supersymmetry, two things that have defined Zachary Marshall’s career. Zach is a researcher with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He is currently the co-convener of the ATLAS Supersymmetry group, leading the team searching for supersymmetry and all its various manifestations, building on his previous work as convenor of the ATLAS Simulation group.

Portrait | 05 Jul 2019

ATLAS delivers its most precise luminosity measurement yet

The large amount of data delivered by the LHC in Run 2 (2015-2018) has not only allowed the ATLAS Experiment to probe previously unexplored territory for rare Standard Model processes and new physics, but also to measure already known processes to better precision. In both cases, but particularly the latter, a precise measurement of the integrated luminosity of the dataset is essential. In other words, how many proton collisions actually occurred in ATLAS during Run 2.

Physics Briefing | 01 Jul 2019

ATLAS releases new result in hunt for mysterious magnetic monopoles

Dipole magnets are probably the best-known source of magnetic fields. They consist of a north and south pole; while one end magnetically attracts, the opposite repels. If you cut a magnet in half, you are left with two magnets, each with its own north and south pole. This apparent absence of an isolated magnetic pole - or “magnetic monopole” - has puzzled physicists for more than a century. It would seem perfectly natural for this particle to be present in our universe; Maxwell’s equations would reflect complete symmetry between electricity and magnetism if particles with magnetic charge were observed. So far the mystery remains: while every known particle in our universe is either electrically charged or neutral, none have been found to be magnetically charged.

Physics Briefing | 03 Jun 2019

Searching for Electroweak SUSY: not because it is easy, but because it is hard

Today, at the Large Hadron Collider Physics (LHCP) conference in Puebla, Mexico, and at the SUSY2019 conference in Corpus Christi, USA, the ATLAS Collaboration presented numerous new searches for SUSY based on the full Run-2 dataset (taken between 2015 and 2018), including two particularly challenging searches for electroweak SUSY. Both target particles that are produced at extremely low rates at the LHC, and decay into Standard Model particles that are themselves difficult to reconstruct. The large amount of data successfully collected by ATLAS in Run 2 provides a unique opportunity to explore these scenarios with new analysis techniques.

Physics Briefing | 20 May 2019

Exploring the scientific potential of the ATLAS experiment at the High-Luminosity LHC

The High-Luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) is scheduled to begin colliding protons in 2026. This major improvement to CERN’s flagship accelerator will increase the total number of collisions in the ATLAS experiment by a factor of 10. To cope with this increase, ATLAS is preparing a complex series of upgrades including the installation of new detectors using state-of-the-art technology, the replacement of ageing electronics, and the upgrade of its trigger and data acquisition system.

News | 17 May 2019

Ten days of Trigger and Data Acquisition at ISOTDAQ

This April marked the 10th anniversary of the International School of Trigger and Data Acquisition (ISOTDAQ). It was a fantastic event that united researchers in physics, computing and engineering, ranging from undergraduate students to post-doctoral scientists. The goal of the school was to teach the "arts and crafts" of triggering and data-acquisition for high-energy physics experiments through a series of lectures and hands-on laboratory exercises.

Blog | 26 Apr 2019

ATLAS Management enters new term

The management of the ATLAS experiment begins a new term this Spring, with Spokesperson Karl Jakobs (University of Freiburg) continuing to steer the collaboration through Long Shutdown 2 to the start of Run 3 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

News | 25 Apr 2019

ATLAS sets strong constraints on supersymmetric dark matter

One of the most complete theoretical frameworks that includes a dark matter candidate is supersymmetry. Dark matter is an unknown type of matter present in the universe, which could be of particle origin. Many supersymmetric models predict the existence of a new stable, invisible particle - the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) – which has the right properties to be a dark matter particle. The ATLAS Collaboration has recently reported two new results on searches for an LSP where it exploited the experiment’s full “Run 2” data sample taken at 13 TeV proton-proton collision energy. The analyses looked for the pair production of two heavy supersymmetric particles, each of which decays to observable Standard Model particles and an LSP in the detector.

Physics Briefing | 08 Apr 2019

Celebrating the recipients of the 2019 ATLAS PhD Grant

At an award ceremony in the Globe of Science and Innovation, the recipients of the 2019 ATLAS PhD Grant were celebrated in the presence of CERN & Society donors and members of the ATLAS community. The ATLAS PhD Grant has supported up-and-coming talents in particle physics since 2014 and this year saw a new donor take up its cause.

News | 29 Mar 2019

Highlights from Moriond: ATLAS explores the full Run-2 dataset

This week, particle physicists from around the world gathered in La Thuile, Italy, for the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference on Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theories. It was one of the first major conferences to be held following the recent completion of the Large Hadron Collider’s (LHC) second operation period (Run 2). The ATLAS Collaboration unveiled a wide range of new results, including new analyses using the full Run-2 dataset, as well as some high-profile studies of Higgs, electroweak and heavy-ion physics.

News | 23 Mar 2019

All together now: adding more pieces to the Higgs boson puzzle

The Higgs boson was discovered in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS experiments, but its rich interaction properties (its coupling to other particles) have remained a puzzle. Thanks to an unprecedented amount of Higgs bosons produced at the LHC, all of the main Higgs boson production and decay modes have now been observed.

Physics Briefing | 19 Mar 2019

ATLAS measures Higgs boson coupling to top quark in diphoton channel with full Run-2 dataset

At the Rencontres de Moriond (La Thuile, Italy), the ATLAS Collaboration presented an updated measurement of ttH production in the diphoton channel. The result examines the full Run-2 dataset – 139 fb-1 collected between 2015 and 2018 – to observe ttH production in a single channel with a significance of 4.9 standard deviations.

Physics Briefing | 18 Mar 2019

ATLAS finds evidence of three massive vector boson production

Today, at the Rencontres de Moriond conference (La Thuile, Italy), the ATLAS collaboration released evidence for the simultaneous production of three W or Z bosons in proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The W and Z bosons are the mediator particles of the weak force – one of the four known fundamental forces – which is responsible for the phenomenon of radioactivity as well as an essential ingredient to our Sun's thermonuclear process.

Physics Briefing | 18 Mar 2019

Light by light scattering

ATLAS observes light scattering off light

Light-by-light scattering is a very rare phenomenon in which two photons – particles of light – interact, producing again a pair of photons. The ATLAS Collaboration has reported the observation of light-by-light scattering with a significance beyond 8 standard deviations.

Physics Briefing | 17 Mar 2019

Searching for Dark Matter with the ATLAS detector

When we look around us, at all the things we can touch and see – all of this is visible matter. And yet, this makes up less than 5% of the universe.

Feature | 05 Mar 2019

First ATLAS result with full Run-2 dataset: a search for new heavy particles

Could a Grand Unified Theory resolve the remaining mysteries of the Standard Model? If verified, it would provide an elegant description of the unification of SM forces at very high energies, and might even explain the existence of dark matter and neutrino masses. ATLAS physicists are searching for evidence of new heavy particles predicted by such theories, including a neutral Z’ gauge boson.

Physics Briefing | 27 Feb 2019

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.

News | 22 Feb 2019

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.

News | 20 Dec 2018

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.

News | 03 Dec 2018

In conversation with Martine Bosman, a pioneer of ATLAS hadronic calorimetry

Martine Bosman is one of the pioneers behind the Tile Calorimeter. Over her long career with the Collaboration, she has held several key roles: from convenor of the Radiation Task Force and the Top Quark Group to Collaboration Board Chair.

Portrait | 26 Nov 2018

Producing four top quarks at once to explore the unknown

For several decades, particle physicists having been trying to better understand Nature at the smallest distances by colliding particles at the highest energies. While the Standard Model of particle physics has successfully explained most of the results that have arisen from experiments, many phenomena remain baffling. Thus, new particles, forces or more general concepts must exist and – if the history of particle physics is any indication – they could well be revealed at the high-energy frontier.

Physics Briefing | 06 Nov 2018

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.

News | 15 Oct 2018

New ATLAS result of ultra-rare B-meson decay to muon pair

The study of hadrons – particles that combine together quarks to form mesons or baryons – is a vital part of the ATLAS physics programme. Their analysis has not only perfected our understanding of the Standard Model, it has also provided excellent opportunities for discovery. On 20 September 2018, at the International Workshop on the CKM Unitarity Triangle (CKM 2018), ATLAS revealed the most stringent experimental constraint of the very rare decay of the B0 meson into two muons (μ).

Physics Briefing | 25 Sep 2018

ATLAS searches for double Higgs production

The Brout-Englert-Higgs (BEH) mechanism is at the core of the Standard Model, the theory that describes the fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions. It introduces a new field, the Higgs field, through which the weak bosons (W and Z) become massive while the photon remains massless. The excitation of this field is a physical particle, the Higgs boson, which was discovered by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations in 2012.

Physics Briefing | 05 Sep 2018

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.

Press Statement | 28 Aug 2018

Stronger together: combining searches for new heavy resonances

While the Standard Model has proven tremendously successful, much experimental evidence points to it not being a complete description of our universe. The search for “new physics” is therefore an important component of the ATLAS experimental programme, where a number of analyses are looking for signs of new heavy particles decaying to different final states. Though these searches have not yet found a significant signal, they have allowed physicists to place stringent constraints on different new physics scenarios. These can be further tightened by combining different analysis channels and approaches.

Physics Briefing | 14 Aug 2018

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.

News | 11 Aug 2018

Lower limit of vector-like top quark mass

Could a new type of quark fix the “unnaturalness” of the Standard Model?

While the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012 confirmed many Standard Model predictions, it has raised as many questions as it has answered. For example, interactions at the quantum level between the Higgs boson and the top quark ought to lead to a huge Higgs boson mass, possibly as large as the Planck mass (>1018 GeV). So why is it only 125 GeV? Is there a mechanism at play to cancel these large quantum corrections caused by the top quark (t)? Finding a way to explain the lightness of the Higgs boson is one of the top (no pun intended) questions in particle physics.

Physics Briefing | 08 Aug 2018

Boosting high-energy physics education around the world with ATLAS Open Data

Since the beginning of ATLAS, collaboration members have devoted hours, days, weeks and months teaching High Energy Physics (HEP) to anyone willing to listen. But sometimes those willing to listen do not have the means, especially when oceans and continents separate them from our experiment in Geneva. How can we overcome these geographical distances to allow anyone interested in HEP to learn?

Blog | 26 Jul 2018

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.

News | 17 Jul 2018

International conferences: interesting physics & instant excitement

What a start it's been to my first conference! I was lucky enough to join the 39th International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP), the biggest conference in High Energy Physics. About 1000 physicists are currently gathered in Seoul, presenting results from all across the field. Getting to visit South Korea plus hearing about cutting-edge physics sounded like a 5-star recipe to me!

Blog | 10 Jul 2018

Higgs boson observed decaying to b quarks – at last!

Today, at the 2018 International Conference on High Energy Physics in Seoul, the ATLAS experiment reported a preliminary result establishing the observation of the Higgs boson decaying into pairs of b quarks, furthermore at a rate consistent with the Standard Model prediction.

Physics Briefing | 09 Jul 2018

Combined measurements of Higgs boson couplings reach new level of precision

Higgs boson couplings manifest themselves in the rate of production of the Higgs boson at the LHC, and its decay branching ratios into various final states. These rates have been precisely measured by the ATLAS experiment, using up to 80 fb–1 of data collected at a proton-proton collision energy of 13 TeV from 2015 to 2017. Measurements were performed in all of the main decay channels of the Higgs boson: to pairs of photons, W and Z bosons, bottom quarks, taus, and muons. The overall production rate of the Higgs boson was measured to be in agreement with Standard Model predictions, with an uncertainty of 8%. The uncertainty is reduced from 11% in the previous combined measurements released last year.

Physics Briefing | 09 Jul 2018

Precision leads to puzzles

The top quark is a unique particle due to its phenomenally high mass. It decays in less than 10-24 seconds, that is, before it had time to interact with any other particles. Therefore many of its quantum numbers, such as its spin, are transferred to its decay particles. When created in matter-antimatter pairs, the spins of the top quark and the antitop quark are expected to be correlated to some degree.

Physics Briefing | 06 Jul 2018

Quarks observed to interact via minuscule “weak lightsabers”

Two among the rarest processes probed so far at the LHC, the scattering between W and Z bosons emitted by quarks in proton-proton collisions, have been established by the ATLAS experiment at CERN.

Physics Briefing | 05 Jul 2018

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.

News | 05 Jul 2018

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.

Feature | 04 Jul 2018

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.

News | 11 Jun 2018

In conversation with Nick Ellis, one of the architects of the ATLAS trigger

A long-standing member of the ATLAS Collaboration, CERN physicist Nick Ellis was one of the original architects of the ATLAS Trigger. Working in the 1980s and 1990s, Nick led groups developing innovative ways to move and process huge quantities of data for the next generation of colliders. It was a challenge some thought was impossible to meet. Nick currently leads the CERN ATLAS Trigger and Data Acquisition Group and shared his wealth of experience as a key part of the ATLAS Collaboration.

Portrait | 10 Jun 2018

Beyond any doubt: Higgs boson couples to the heaviest lepton

A decisive property of the Higgs boson is its affinity to mass. The heavier a particle is, the stronger the Higgs boson will couple to it. While physicists have firmly established this property for heavy W and Z bosons (force carriers), more data are needed to measure the Higgs boson coupling to the heavy fermions (matter particles). These interactions, known as Yukawa couplings, are very interesting as they proceed through a quite different mechanism than the coupling to force-carrying bosons in the Standard Model.

Physics Briefing | 08 Jun 2018

Catching hadronic vector boson decays with a finer net

Many theoretical models predict that new physics, which could provide answers to these questions, could manifest itself as yet-undiscovered massive particles. These include massive new particles that would decay to much lighter high-momentum electroweak bosons (W and Z). These in turn decay, and the most common signature would be pairs of highly collimated bundles of particles, known as jets.

Physics Briefing | 05 Jun 2018

New ATLAS result establishes production of Higgs boson in association with top quarks

According to the Standard Model, quarks, charged leptons, and W and Z bosons obtain their mass through interactions with the Higgs field, whose fluctuation gives rise to the Higgs boson. To test this theory, ATLAS takes high-precision measurements of the interactions between the Higgs boson and these particles. While experiments had observed and measured the Higgs boson decaying to pairs of W or Z bosons, photons or tau leptons, the Higgs coupling to quarks had – until now – not been observed.

Physics Briefing | 04 Jun 2018

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.

Press Statement | 04 Jun 2018

The edge of SUSY

The ATLAS experiment has just completed a new search for evidence of supersymmetry (SUSY), a theory that predicts the existence of new “super-partner” particles, with different properties from their Standard Model counterparts. This search looks for SUSY particles decaying to produce two leptons and scrutinises the invariant mass distribution of these leptons, hoping to find a bump.

Physics Briefing | 02 Jun 2018

Noble collisions give new insights on heavy ion systems

In October 2017, the ATLAS experiment recorded collisions of xenon nuclei for the first time. While massive compared to a proton, xenon nuclei are smaller than the lead ions typically collided in the LHC. The xenon-xenon collision data, combined with previous results from the analysis of lead-lead collisions, provide the first opportunity to examine heavy ion collisions in a system that is distinctly smaller in size. This allows physicists to study in detail the role of the collision geometry for observables often associated with the quark-gluon plasma.

Physics Briefing | 24 May 2018

ATLAS studies the quark-gluon plasma using muon pairs produced by two photons

Heavy ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) form a hot, dense medium called the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), in which the primary constituents are thought to be quarks and gluons produced in the initial interactions of the nuclei. Besides typical heavy ion collisions, where the nucleons in the colliding nuclei undergo multiple strong interactions with each other, there is also a class of “ultraperipheral” collisions. In these collisions, the nuclei are far enough apart to miss each other, but the surrounding electromagnetic field of one nucleus is able to interact both with the other nucleus (“photonuclear” interactions) and with the other electromagnetic field (“photon-photon” interactions).

Physics Briefing | 19 May 2018

Waiting for physics: Stable beams!

Following the first “beam splash” tests in early-April, the ATLAS experiment awaited the next milestone on the road to data-taking: "stable beams". This is when the LHC proton beams are aligned, squeezed, focused and finally steered to collide head-to-head. It is an important test, as it allows us to verify that the collision mechanism is ready to take data that are good for physics studies.

Blog | 11 May 2018

Waiting for physics: Splashing beams

Each year, around mid-spring, the giant LHC accelerator wakes up from its winter maintenance and gets ready for a new feverish period of data taking. But before smashing protons once again, some tests have to be done, to check that everything is in order and that the machine can accelerate and collide particles properly, as it did before the shutdown.

Blog | 10 May 2018

Searching for forces beyond the Standard Model

The ATLAS collaboration is continuing to scour the wealth of data provided by the LHC for any signs of physics beyond the particles and interactions described by the Standard Model. One approach is to search for new forces in addition to the Standard Model’s electroweak and strong interactions. Such forces could be propagated by new massive bosons playing the role the W and Z bosons have in mediating the electroweak force.

Physics Briefing | 08 May 2018

Charming SUSY: running out of places to hide

Why is gravity so much weaker than the other forces of nature? This fundamental discrepancy, known as the “hierarchy problem”, has long been a source of puzzlement. Since the discovery of a scalar particle, the Higgs boson, with a mass of 125 GeV near that of the W and Z bosons mediating the weak force, the hierarchy problem is more acute than ever.

Physics Briefing | 07 May 2018

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.

News | 04 May 2018

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.

News | 30 Apr 2018

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.

News | 23 Apr 2018

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.

News | 11 Apr 2018

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.

News | 31 Mar 2018

Will.i.am and Roosevelt High School students

Angels and Teachers

I met beautiful people in Los Angeles earlier this month: smart, talented students, all destined for great careers. They welcomed me to their high schools and their after-school programmes, all well-equipped with computing, electronics, a robotics lab and, above all, a brilliant staff of teachers.

Blog | 27 Mar 2018

ATLAS illuminates the Higgs boson at 13 TeV

The ATLAS collaboration has released a set of comprehensive results that illuminate the properties of the Higgs boson with improved precision, using its decay into two photons with LHC collisions recorded at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV.

Physics Briefing | 26 Mar 2018

New data-collection method aids in the hunt for new physics

What do you do when you produce more data than you can handle? This might seem like a strange question for experimental physicists, but it’s a problem that the ATLAS detector faces every day. While the LHC continues to produce ever-higher rates of proton collisions, the detector can only record data at a fixed rate. Therefore, tough choices must be made about what events to keep. This is not a decision made lightly – what if the thrown-away data contain some long-sought new particles beyond those of the Standard Model.

Physics Briefing | 21 Mar 2018

The exploration of the Higgs boson continues

Discovering the Higgs boson can be likened to finding a new continent. While a momentous event in itself, the most exciting part remains the exploration of the new land! In a new result presented today at the Rencontres de Moriond, the ATLAS collaboration examined the Higgs boson decaying into two W bosons

Physics Briefing | 12 Mar 2018

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.

News | 27 Feb 2018

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.

Press Statement | 12 Feb 2018

ATLAS studies the dynamics of very high-momentum top quarks

The top quark – the heaviest known fundamental particle – plays a unique role in high-energy physics. Studies of its properties have opened new opportunities for furthering our knowledge of the Standard Model. In a new paper submitted to Physical Review D, the ATLAS collaboration presents a comprehensive measurement of high-momentum top-quark pair production at 13 TeV.

Physics Briefing | 31 Jan 2018

Measurements of weak top quark processes gain strength

The production of top quarks in association with vector bosons is a hot topic at the LHC. ATLAS first reported strong evidence for the production of a top quark in association with a Z boson at the EPS 2017 conference. In a paper submitted to the Journal of High-Energy Physics, the ATLAS experiment describes the measurement of top-quark production in association with a W boson in 13 TeV collisions.

Physics Briefing | 18 Jan 2018

Reaching out across cultures

This past Spring, I had the opportunity to travel to Taos, New Mexico, USA, to work with artist Agnes Chavez, on one of her “Projecting Particles” workshops. Her innovative programme aims to develop STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) skills in students aged 8 and up, employing a mixture of science education and artistic expression. It is a winning combination for everyone involved.

Blog | 05 Jan 2018

Searching for supersymmetric Higgs bosons on the compressed frontier

The Standard Model has a number of puzzling features. For instance, why does the Higgs boson have a relatively low mass? Could its mass arise from a hidden symmetry that keeps it from being extremely heavy? And what about dark matter? While the Standard Model has some (almost) invisible particles, like neutrinos, those particles can’t account for all of the dark matter observed by cosmological measurements.

Physics Briefing | 18 Dec 2017

"Stransverse" mass distribution

Squeezing sleptons at the LHC

Supersymmetry (SUSY) is an extension of the Standard Model that predicts the existence of “superpartners” with slightly different properties compared to their Standard Model counterparts. Physicists have been searching for signs of SUSY for over forty years, so far without success, which makes us think that SUSY particles — should they exist — are also heavier than particles in the Standard Model. However, in order for SUSY to help mitigate some problems with the Higgs boson sector of the Standard Model, SUSY particles should not be too heavy. And if some SUSY particles are relatively light, then they should be produced copiously at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). So for SUSY to remain an attractive theory of nature, it must be hiding in plain sight in LHC data.

Physics Briefing | 15 Dec 2017

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.

News | 13 Dec 2017

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.

Feature | 08 Dec 2017

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.

News | 06 Nov 2017

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.

News | 31 Oct 2017

ATLAS finds evidence of the Higgs boson produced in association with a pair of top quarks

The ATLAS collaboration has presented evidence of “ttH production”, a rare process where a pair of top quarks emits a Higgs boson. Observing this process would provide new insight into the Higgs mechanism and allow for new studies of how unknown physics might (or might not) change the behaviour of this fundamental particle.

Physics Briefing | 26 Oct 2017

Photon-tagged jet quenching in the quark-gluon plasma

Collisions of lead nuclei in the LHC form the hot, dense medium known as the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Experimentally, the QGP is characterized by the collective flow of emerging quarks and gluons. They fragment into highly collimated “jets” of particles that in turn lose energy through a phenomenon known as “jet quenching”. Studying this effect can help improve our understanding of quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong nuclear interaction that governs the behaviour of the QGP.

Physics Briefing | 23 Oct 2017

Studying fragments of the top quark

Using Run 1 data, ATLAS reports a new differential production rate measurement of top quark pairs and a precise new determination of the top quark mass.

Physics Briefing | 05 Oct 2017

British Science Festival

The art of physics

I have been doing some work with artists recently. Not that I’m planning a career change, you know: I just love to talk about my research to anyone who is prepared to listen, and lately it’s been with artists. Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, aka Semiconductor, are internationally renowned visual artists who in 2015 won the Collide@CERN Ars Electronica Award and spent a two-month residency at CERN. Like myself, they live in Brighton, which is also home to the University of Sussex, where I work.

Blog | 04 Oct 2017

Hunting down forbidden decays of the top quark

Ordinary matter is made of just three kinds of elementary particles: up and down quarks, which form the atomic nucleus, and electrons, which surround the nucleus. But the rest of nature is not so straightforward: heavier forms of quarks and leptons are produced regularly at particle accelerators.

Physics Briefing | 03 Oct 2017

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.

News | 02 Oct 2017

ATLAS and CMS look forward with the top quark

The top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle, has a unique place in the Standard Model. By precisely measuring its properties, ATLAS physicists can probe physics beyond our current understanding.

Physics Briefing | 27 Sep 2017

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.

News | 22 Sep 2017

Finding a haystack in a field of haystacks

In order to produce rare physics phenomena, such as the Higgs boson or possible signs of new physics, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) collides tens of millions of protons per second. Under such conditions, around 20 simultaneous proton-proton interactions occur in each beam crossing. Thus, additional collisions called “pile-up” are recorded along with the collision of interest. Together, they form a single event for analysis.

Physics Briefing | 22 Sep 2017

Exploring the nature of the “ridge” in small systems

When ultra-relativistic heavy ions collide, a new state of hot and dense matter – the quark–gluon plasma (QGP) – is created. One of the key features for this state is the observation of long-range azimuthal angle correlations between particles emitted over a wide range of pseudorapidity. This phenomenon is often referred to as the “ridge”.

Physics Briefing | 28 Aug 2017

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).

Press Statement | 14 Aug 2017

Exploring rare decays of the Higgs boson

Since discovering a Higgs boson in 2012, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations have been trying to understand whether this new particle is the Higgs boson as predicted by the Standard Model, or a Higgs boson from a more exotic model containing new, as yet undiscovered, particles. The answer lies in the properties of the Higgs boson.

Physics Briefing | 11 Aug 2017

5 fundamental parameters from top quark decay

For many physicists, discovering “new physics” means bringing to light a new particle. Another path to discovery lies in carefully measuring the properties of known particles and the interactions between them. The ATLAS experiment has now released new results on the top quark's interaction with the charged intermediate vector boson.

Physics Briefing | 03 Aug 2017

The invisible plan

As the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) smashes together protons at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, it creates a rich assortment of particles that are identified through the signature of their interactions with the ATLAS detector. But what if there are particles being produced that travel through ATLAS without interacting? These “invisible particles” may provide the answers to some of the greatest mysteries in physics.

Physics Briefing | 17 Jul 2017

ATLAS highlights from EPS-HEP 2017

The ATLAS Collaboration has presented important new results at the European Physical Society conference on High Energy Physics (EPS-HEP) in Venice (Italy), including the latest analyses of 13 TeV Run 2 data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

News | 12 Jul 2017

Probing physics beyond the Standard Model with heavy vector bosons

Although the discovery of the Higgs boson by the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations in 2012 completed the Standard Model, many mysteries remain unexplained. For instance, why is the mass of the Higgs boson so much lighter than one would expect and why is gravity so weak?

Physics Briefing | 08 Jul 2017

New rare pairs of heavy friends in ATLAS

Observing rare productions of heavy elementary particles can provide fresh insight into the Standard Model of particle physics. In a new result, the ATLAS Experiment presents strong evidence for the production of a single top-quark in association with a Z boson.

Physics Briefing | 07 Jul 2017

Why should there be only one? Searching for additional Higgs Bosons beyond the Standard Model

Since the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson in 2012, researchers have been looking beyond the Standard Model to answer many outstanding questions. An attractive extension to the Standard Model is Supersymmetry (SUSY), which introduces a plethora of new particles, some of which may be candidates for Dark Matter.

Physics Briefing | 06 Jul 2017

New ATLAS measurement of the Higgs Boson mass

The ATLAS collaboration has released a new preliminary measurement of the Higgs boson mass using 2015 and 2016 LHC data. The number of recorded Higgs boson events has more than tripled since the first measurement of the Higgs boson was released, using 2011/2012 data. An improved precision in the measurement of the Higgs boson mass has been made possible by both the increased collision energy of 13 TeV and improved collision rate.

Physics Briefing | 06 Jul 2017

ATLAS takes a closer look at the Higgs boson’s couplings to other bosons

Since resuming operation for Run 2, the LHC has been producing about 20,000 Higgs bosons per day in its 13 TeV proton–proton collisions. At the end of 2015, the data collected by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations were already enough to re-observe the Higgs boson at the new collision energy. Now, having recorded more than 36,000 trillion collisions between 2015 and 2016, ATLAS can perform ever more precise measurements of the properties of the Higgs boson

Physics Briefing | 06 Jul 2017

Chasing the invisible

Cosmological and astrophysical observations based on gravitational interactions indicate that the matter described by the Standard Model of particle physics constitutes only a small fraction of the entire known Universe. These observations infer the existence of Dark Matter, which, if of particle nature, would have to be beyond the Standard Model.

Physics Briefing | 06 Jul 2017

A first LHC sighting of the Higgs boson in its favourite decay

Until now, the Higgs boson had been observed decaying to photons, tau leptons, and W and Z bosons. However, these impressive achievements represent only 30% of the Higgs boson decays! The Higgs boson’s favoured decay to a pair of b-quarks, which was predicted to happen around 58% of the time and thus drives the short lifetime of the Higgs boson, had so far remained elusive. Observing this decay would fill in one of the big missing pieces of our knowledge of the Higgs sector. It would confirm that the Higgs mechanism is responsible for the masses of quarks and might also provide hints of new physics beyond our current theories. All in all, it is a vital missing piece of the Higgs boson puzzle!

Physics Briefing | 06 Jul 2017

How to run a particle detector

If you are interested in particle physics, you probably hear a lot about the huge amount of data that is recorded by experiments like ATLAS. But where does this data come from? Roughly speaking: first you have to plan, build and maintain an experiment and in the end you need people to analyse the data you’ve recorded. But what happens in between? What happens in the day-to-day life of people in the ATLAS control room, who are responsible for keeping all that great data coming?

Blog | 23 Jun 2017

Hunt for Dark Matter in the “Phantom of the Universe”

From the chaotic moments after the Big Bang to present day proton collisions in the ATLAS Experiment, the new planetarium show Phantom of the Universe takes viewers on the hunt for dark matter. The show has been awarded an honourable mention for outstanding and innovative production at the 11th International FullDome Festival in Germany.

News | 21 Jun 2017

More than the sum of its parts: inside the proton

Discovered almost 100 years ago by Ernest Rutherford, the proton was one of the first particles to be studied in depth. Yet there’s still much about it that remains a mystery. Where does its mass and spin come from? What is it made of? To answer these questions, ATLAS physicists are using “jets” of particles emitted by the LHC as a magnifying glass to examine the inner structure of the proton.

Physics Briefing | 13 Jun 2017

Something old, something new: perspective of LHCP2017

More than 400 physicists from around the world visiting Shanghai to hear the latest LHC results, at the fifth annual Large Hadron Collider Physics (LHCP17) conference. It was a wonderful opportunity for Chinese particle physicists and students, who do not often have the chance to travel abroad! Even for me, although I have been working on the LHC for almost 10 years, this was still my first time attending such a high-level conference to hear the first-rate physics results from all four experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.

Blog | 07 Jun 2017

ATLAS kicks off a new year at 13 TeV

Geneva, 23 May 2017. A new season of record-breaking kicked off today, as the ATLAS experiment began recording first data for physics of 2017. This will be the LHC’s third year colliding beams at an energy of 13 tera electron volts (TeV), allowing the ATLAS Experiment to continue to push the limits of physics.

Press Statement | 23 May 2017

ATLAS highlights from LHCP 2017

The fifth annual Large Hadron Collider Physics (LHCP2017) conference was held this week at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in a leafy suburb in the former French concession in Shanghai, China. This year there were more participants than ever before: 470 people from universities across the globe. ATLAS presented an interesting set of new results exploiting the high statistics of the combined 2015 and 2016 dataset.

News | 23 May 2017

ATLAS at the starting line

The start of the 2017 run marks the conclusion of a maintenance period known as the Extended Year-End-Technical-Stop (EYETS). This upkeep is vital for the health and well-being of the detector, ensuring that ATLAS can thrive for the months of high-intensity operation that follow.

News | 19 May 2017

ATLAS releases new results in search for weakly-interacting supersymmetric particles

Supersymmetry is an extension to the Standard Model that may explain the origin of dark matter and pave the way to a grand unified theory of nature. For each particle of the Standard Model, supersymmetry introduces an exotic new “super-partner,” which may be produced in proton-proton collisions. Searching for these particles is currently one of the top priorities of the LHC physics program. A discovery would transform our understanding of the building blocks of matter and the fundamental forces, leading to a paradigm shift in physics similar to when Einstein’s relativity superseded classical Newtonian physics in the early 20th century.

Physics Briefing | 18 May 2017

Hunting for the superpartner of the top quark

Supersymmetry (SUSY) is one of the most attractive theories extending the Standard Model of particle physics. SUSY would provide a solution to several of the Standard Model’s unanswered questions, by more than doubling the number of elementary particles, giving each fermion a bosonic partner and vice versa. In many SUSY models the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) constitutes dark matter.

Physics Briefing | 17 May 2017

New ATLAS precision measurements of the Higgs Boson in the 'golden channel'

With the huge amount of proton–proton collisions delivered by the LHC in 2015 and 2016 at the increased collision energy of 13 TeV, ATLAS has entered a new era of Higgs boson property measurements. The new data allowed ATLAS to perform measurements of inclusive and differential cross sections using the “golden” H->ZZ*->4l decay.

Physics Briefing | 15 May 2017

New insight into the Standard Model

Ever since the LHC collided its first protons in 2009, the ATLAS Collaboration has been persistently studying their interactions with increasing precision. To this day, it has always observed them to be as expected by the Standard Model. Though it remains unrefuted, physicists are convinced that a better theory must exist to explain certain fundamental questions: What is the nature of the dark matter? Why is the gravitational force so weak compared to the other forces?

Physics Briefing | 09 May 2017

Making the most of the ATLAS detector

Up to now, ATLAS has measured the energies and positions of jets using the finely segmented calorimeter system, in which both electrically charged and neutral particles interact. However, the inner detector tracking system provides more precise measurements of charged particle energies and positions. A recent ATLAS paper describes a particle flow algorithm that extrapolates the charged tracks seen by the inner detector to the calorimeter regions.

Physics Briefing | 02 May 2017

Beams return to the ATLAS Experiment

With the year’s first proton beams now circulating in the Large Hadron Collider, physicists have today recorded “beam splashes” in the ATLAS experiment

News | 29 Apr 2017

Charged-particle reconstruction at the energy frontier

A new age of exploration dawned at the start of Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider, as protons began colliding at the unprecedented centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. The ATLAS experiment now frequently observes highly collimated bundles of particles (known as jets) with energies of up to multiple TeV, as well as tau-leptons and b-hadrons that pass through the innermost detector layers before decaying. These energetic collisions are prime hunting grounds for signs of new physics, including massive, hypothetical new particles that would decay to much lighter – and therefore highly boosted – bosons.

Physics Briefing | 26 Apr 2017

Impressions from Moriond

The 52nd Rencontres de Moriond conference was held in La Thuile, Italy, from the 18 March to 1 April. The first week, which ran until 25 March, was devoted to the theme "Electroweak interactions and unified theories", while the second week was based on the theme of “QCD and high energy interaction”.

News | 06 Apr 2017

Searching for new symmetries of nature

The fundamental forces of nature are intimately related to corresponding symmetries. For example, the properties of electromagnetic interactions (or force) can be derived by requiring the theory that describes it to remain unchanged (or invariant) under a certain localised transformation. Such an invariance is referred to as a symmetry, just as one would refer to an object as being symmetric if it looks the same after being rotated or reflected. The particular symmetry related to the forces acting among particles is called gauge symmetry.

Physics Briefing | 06 Apr 2017

Improving our understanding of photon pairs

High-energy photon pairs at the LHC are famous for two things. First, as a clean decay channel of the Higgs boson. Second, for triggering some lively discussions in the scientific community in late 2015, when a modest excess above Standard Model predictions was observed by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations.

Physics Briefing | 05 Apr 2017

ATLAS highlights from Moriond 2017

At this year’s Rencontres de Moriond, the ATLAS collaboration presented the first results examining the combined 2015/2016 LHC data at 13 TeV proton–proton collision energy. Thanks to outstanding performance of the CERN accelerator complex last year, this new dataset is almost three times larger than that available at ICHEP, the last major particle physics conference held in August 2016.

News | 02 Apr 2017

Quest for the lost arc

Nature has surprised physicists many times in history and certainly will do so again. Therefore, physicists have to keep an open mind when searching for phenomena beyond the Standard Model.

Physics Briefing | 21 Mar 2017

Particle-hunting at the energy frontier

There are many mysteries the Standard Model of particle physics cannot answer. Why is there an imbalance between matter and anti-matter in our Universe? What is the nature of dark matter or dark energy? And many more. The existence of physics beyond the Standard Model can solve some of these fundamental questions. By studying the head-on collisions of protons at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV provided by the LHC, the ATLAS Collaboration is on the hunt for signs of new physics.

Physics Briefing | 21 Mar 2017

Searching for signs of the “stop”

In new results presented at the Moriond Electroweak conference, the ATLAS Collaboration has sifted through the full available data sample of the LHC’s 13 TeV proton collisions in search of a specific SUSY particle: the heavy partner to the top quark, called the “top squark” or “stop”

Physics Briefing | 21 Mar 2017

The search for super-particles continues!

Many of the most important unanswered questions in fundamental physics are related to mass. Why do elementary particles, which we have observed and measured at CERN and other laboratories, have the masses they do? And why are they so different, with the mass of the top quark more than three hundred thousand times that of the electron? The presence of dark matter in our universe is inferred because of its mass but, if it is a particle, what is it? While the Standard Model has been a tremendously successful theory in describing the interactions of sub-atomic particles, we must look to even larger masses in search of answers and, potentially, new supersymmetric particles

Physics Briefing | 20 Mar 2017

ATLAS to present new results at Moriond

Every March for the past 50 years, particles physicists have been heading to the mountains. The terminus of this migration? Les Rencontres de Moriond, one of the year’s first major conference for high-energy physics.

News | 19 Mar 2017

ATLAS Spokesperson Karl Jakobs

New management at the ATLAS Experiment

Karl Jakobs from the University of Freiburg is a familiar face at CERN and in the ATLAS Experiment. He’s been part of the collaboration since the signing of the ATLAS Letter of Intent in 1992, having taken on various coordination roles, and followed the experiment through all its phases. Now, after twenty-five years with the collaboration, Karl is moving into the main office as spokesperson.

News | 03 Mar 2017

Award season at the ATLAS Experiment

From detector development to detailed searches for new physics, ATLAS PhD students publish dozens of outstanding theses every year. Since 2010, a few have been celebrated at the annual ATLAS Thesis Awards.

News | 28 Feb 2017

Meet the talented recipients of the ATLAS PhD Grant

Motivated. Outstanding. Enthusiastic. These are the criteria used when selecting the recipients of the ATLAS PhD Grant. It’s a tough competition.

News | 16 Feb 2017

Integrated fiducial cross sections times leptonic branching ratios

How strange is the proton?

What precision measurement of the inclusive W+, W− and Z/γ∗ production cross sections can tell us about the true nature of the proton.

Physics Briefing | 25 Jan 2017

Return of the top quark!

For the first time, ATLAS has measured the kinematics of the top quark and of the tt̅ system in 13 TeV events containing two charged leptons, two neutrinos and two jets (called “dilepton” events).

Physics Briefing | 13 Jan 2017

The trouble with terabytes

2016 has been a record-breaking year. The LHC surpassed its design luminosity and produced stable beams a staggering 60% of the time – up from 40% in previous years, and even surpassing the hoped for 50% threshold. While all of the ATLAS experiment rejoiced – eager to analyse the vast outpouring of data from the experiment – its computing experts had their work cut out for them.

News | 14 Dec 2016

Measuring the W boson mass

The ATLAS collaboration is now reporting the first measurement of the W mass using LHC proton-proton collisions data at a centre-of-mass energy at 7 TeV. The ATLAS result matches the best single-experiment measurement of the W mass performed by the CDF collaboration.

Physics Briefing | 13 Dec 2016

Become a Higgs Hunter

HiggsHunters is the first mass-participation citizen science project for the Large Hadron Collider, allowing non-experts to get directly involved in physics analysis. Since its launch in 2014 on the Zooniverse platform, over 30,000 people from 179 countries have participated in the project. Their work has led to the project’s first publication on arXiv.

News | 05 Dec 2016

Is there life after physics?

Am I going to dedicate my entire life to high-energy physics? Am I qualified to work in another field, if I wish to? These are questions we may ask ourselves as we near the end of a contract. On Tuesday 29 November, the four experiments, ATLAS, ALICE, CMS and LHCb, organized a meeting with some of their former physicists who had decided to take the plunge into the business world.

Blog | 02 Dec 2016

What happens when energy goes missing?

Here at ATLAS, we like to consider ourselves pretty decent at tracking down particles. In fact, we do it every day. Just because a proton-proton collision doesn’t produce the next Nobel Prize winning particle doesn’t mean we can ignore it. Teams of physicists are still combing through every single event, rebuilding known particles out of the signals they leave us

Blog | 03 Nov 2016

Counting collisions

Whether searching for signs of new physics, or making precise measurements of known interactions, it is essential to know the total number of proton-proton collisions that the LHC delivers in ATLAS. This parameter, known as “luminosity”, is a vital part of ATLAS analysis.

News | 27 Oct 2016

ATLAS awards outstanding achievement

The 2016 ATLAS Outstanding Achievement Awards ceremony was held at CERN on 20 October. Now in its third year, the awards give recognition to excellent contributions made to the collaboration, with an emphasis on activities carried out in the first year of Run 2.

News | 24 Oct 2016

The many faces of research

Ever since the age of 10, as far as I remember, I have been fascinated by technical and natural sciences, especially physics. I loved building (and repairing) experiments or things. As a result, in high school I happily attended an advanced course in physics and continued my studies at RWTH Aachen University (Germany).

Blog | 17 Oct 2016

Mel's Drive-In, San Francisco

Higgs over easy

My colleagues and I are in town to attend the 22nd International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP 2016, for short). I like to think of us as the nerds of the nerds. Computing, networking, software, middleware, bandwidth, and processors are the topics of discussion, and there is indeed much to talk about.

Blog | 12 Oct 2016

Dortmund students work with ATLAS data

The ATLAS Open Data platform is inspiring new ways to teach high-energy physics. Universities can incorporate the data into their curriculum, giving their students hands-on analysis experience and introducing them to the world of research.

News | 29 Sep 2016

An exceptional summer

For many students, summer means sun and beach volleyball. For some, though, it is an opportunity to learn at ATLAS! Thanks to CERN’s Summer Student Programme, every year dozens of university students come to ATLAS to spend their holidays in this unique environment. During these three months they alternate between lectures and work, always supported by their supervisors. This summer, ATLAS hosted 50 students from 31 different countries. Here are some of their stories.

News | 30 Aug 2016

Precision measurements with multi-TeV energy jets

The strong force is one of the four fundamental interactions of Nature. It governs the interactions between quarks and gluons, and is thus responsible for the stability of ordinary matter. In the proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, the strong force is seen in the production of collimated sprays of mesons and baryons, known as hadron jets. The ATLAS Collaboration has released the measurement of the inclusive jet production cross sections at the new 13 TeV energy frontier.

Physics Briefing | 23 Aug 2016

ATLAS highlights from ICHEP2016

The International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) wraps up its 38th edition today in Chicago. For ATLAS, it brings to a close an intense period of analysis. The collaboration presented 64 new sets of results at the conference, ranging from detector performance studies to measurements of Standard Model processes to searches for new physics. All in all, a rather stellar turnout.

News | 10 Aug 2016

ICHEP results presented with style!

For those of you with an affinity for Twitter, you’ll know that the ICHEP press crew have been utilising all of their dark arts to bring you the most interesting results as they’re presented at ICHEP 2016.

Blog | 08 Aug 2016

Hunting for new physics with boosted bosons

One of the most direct ways to search for the unexpected is to look for new particles, often with multi-TeV mass. These heavy particles are featured in beyond the Standard Model theories and could be created at the Large Hadron Collider.

Physics Briefing | 06 Aug 2016

Double the bosons, double the excitement

ATLAS has performed measurements of boson-pair production using data from 13 TeV proton-proton collisions that began in 2015. The cross-section (a measure of the production frequency) of the WW boson pair production was measured and was compared to a previous measurement in 8 TeV collisions.

Physics Briefing | 05 Aug 2016

High-mass di-photon resonances: the first 2016 ATLAS results

One of the highlights of last year’s physics results was the appearance of an excess in the search for a new particle decaying into two photons ("the di-photon channel"). New results in this channel were presented at the ICHEP conference in Chicago on Friday, 5 August.

Physics Briefing | 05 Aug 2016

ATLAS observes the Higgs boson with Run 2 data

The LHC’s jump in energy to 13 TeV in Run 2, together with the copious amount of collisions delivered over the last 12 months, has allowed the ATLAS experiment to collect a data sample that is more than equivalent to the one collected during Run 1.

Physics Briefing | 04 Aug 2016

Further progress in the quest for SUSY particles

ATLAS physicists have been eagerly searching the collected data for evidence of the production of the supersymmetric top quark (squark). Recent ATLAS results feature five separate searches for this elusive particle.

Physics Briefing | 04 Aug 2016

Hunting the origin of the top quark’s mass

The ATLAS experiment has been searching for the process in which a pair of top quarks is produced, where one is a “virtual” particle that emits a Higgs boson on the way to becoming a “real” particle. This process is referred to as ttH production after the particles that are produced.

Physics Briefing | 04 Aug 2016

Searching for new phenomena in final states with missing momentum and jets

The nature of dark matter remains one of the greatest mysteries in physics. While extraordinary, the Standard Model can not explain dark matter, whose existence is well established by cosmological measurements.

Physics Briefing | 04 Aug 2016

New ATLAS results to be presented at ICHEP

Results using record-breaking 2016 data will be presented at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Chicago, 3-10 August.

News | 03 Aug 2016

Explore LHC data on new ATLAS educational platform

On Friday 29 July, the ATLAS experiment at CERN released the data from 100 trillion proton-proton collisions to the public. This includes the world’s first open release of 8 TeV data, gathered from the Large Hadron Collider in 2012, making it the most current high-energy physics open data.

News | 28 Jul 2016

A busy day in the life of high energy physicist

My work involves analyzing data to try to understand how nature works at the most fundamental level, by searching for new particles and ways in which they interact. Specifically, I am looking at the top quark, which is the heaviest fundamental particle known to exist, with a mass of about 180 times that of a proton.

Blog | 27 Jun 2016

Continuing the search for extra dimensions

For a long time, physicists have assumed that space-time has four dimensions in total – three of space and one of time – in agreement with what we see when we look around us. However, some theorists have proposed that there may be other spatial dimensions that we don’t experience in our daily lives.

Physics Briefing | 17 Jun 2016

Di-photons in the spotlight

The ATLAS collaboration has now released the final results on the search for new physics in the di-photon channel using 2015 data.

Physics Briefing | 17 Jun 2016

Something went bump in the night

ATLAS has published hundreds of studies of LHC data, with the Higgs boson discovery being perhaps the best known. Amongst the Run 1 searches there was one which stood out: the diboson excess.

Physics Briefing | 16 Jun 2016

A peek inside the proton…

When the protons from the LHC collide, they sometimes produce W and Z bosons, the massive carriers of the weak force responsible for radioactive decays. These bosons are produced in abundance at the LHC and ATLAS physicists have now precisely measured their production rates using 13 TeV proton-proton collision data recorded in 2015.

Physics Briefing | 16 Jun 2016

Weighing in on the top quark mass

ATLAS has released a new precise measurement of the mass of the top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle.

Physics Briefing | 15 Jun 2016

Stacking the building blocks of the 2016 ATLAS physics programme

2016 is set to be an outstanding year for the ATLAS experiment and the Large Hadron Collider. We’re expecting up to 10 times more data compared to 2015, which will allow us to make precise measurements of many known physics processes and to search for new physics.

Physics Briefing | 13 Jun 2016

ATLAS to present new results at LHCP conference

The Large Hadron Collider Physics (LHCP2016) conference kicked off today in Lund, Sweden. Held annually, the LHCP conference is an opportunity for experimental and theoretical physicists to discuss results from across the high-energy physics community. From Standard Model Physics and Heavy Ion Physics to Supersymmetry and other Beyond Standard Model investigations, the conference unites the disciplines to examine recent progress and consider future developments.

News | 13 Jun 2016

An insider view of the "marten affair"

Friday morning, 29 April 2016: what was expected to be a productive shift turned out to be very different.

Blog | 07 Jun 2016

Spring celebrations in Pisa as the LHC restarts

PP@LHC is an Italian conference with important contributions by foreign institutes, focused on the proton-proton physics performed at the LHC by the ATLAS, CMS and LHCb experiments. The aim of this year’s edition was not only to give an overview on the current status of LHC research, but to focus on future challenges with the upcoming new data.

Blog | 31 May 2016

Make music with ATLAS data

From techno beats to classical melodies, from jazz swinging to pop and rock riffs – the ATLAS experiment can play them all. Thanks to Quantizer, a platform that translates ATLAS events into notes and rhythms, one of the most complex scientific instruments in the world will not only search for new physics, but also generate music.

News | 20 May 2016

Picturing particles

Spring is now in full bloom at the ATLAS experiment which recorded the year’s first collisions for physics on Monday, 9 May. Event displays from these collisions were immediately streaming on the ATLAS live website, with some shared across social media platforms.

News | 11 May 2016

ATLAS continues to explore the 13 TeV frontier

ATLAS is back and better than ever! With 13 TeV beams circulating in the Large Hadron Collider, the ATLAS experiment is now recording data for physics. This milestone marks the start of the second year of “Run 2” as ATLAS continues its exploration of 13 TeV energy frontier.

News | 09 May 2016

The search for the dark side of the Universe

ATLAS scientists have just released a new publication with results based on an analysis of the early Run 2 data collected in 2015 using 13 TeV proton-proton collisions.

Physics Briefing | 13 Apr 2016

Wanted: SUSY particle still at large

According to classical electrodynamics, the electromagnetic energy (and mass) of a point-like electron should be infinite. This is of course not the case! The solution of the riddle is antimatter - the ‘vacuum’ around every electron is filled with a cloud of electrons and anti-electrons and the combined energy turns out to be finite.

Physics Briefing | 07 Apr 2016

One does not simply give a talk at Moriond

The third day of the Moriond QCD conference was dedicated to quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory that describes strong interactions itself.

Blog | 05 Apr 2016

Bumps in the light

Here we are at the second blog from the Moriond QCD conference and, as promised, I will discuss a bit of physics.

Blog | 04 Apr 2016

Spring awakening for the ATLAS experiment

This morning the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) circulated the first proton-proton beams of 2016 around its 27 kilometre circumference. The beams were met with great enthusiasm in the ATLAS Control Centre as they passed through the ATLAS experiment.

News | 24 Mar 2016

First impressions from the Moriond conference

My name is Mario Campanelli, and I am a physicist who has been working for about 9 years on the ATLAS experiment, as part of the academic staff of University College London. This is the first time I write a blog, but I do have quite an experience in communicating science to the public, having guided visitors around CERN since I started working there as a PhD student 20 years ago, and also having written two books for the general public. Since Saturday I have been in La Thuile, a mountain resort in the Italian Alps, for the Rencontres de Moriond - arguably the most important winter conference in particle physics.

Blog | 24 Mar 2016

Searching beyond the Standard Model with photon pairs

The ATLAS Collaboration uses two selections in this search, one optimised for Higgs-like particles that are expected to have a strong signal compared to background with both photons in the central region of the detector (the “spin-0” selection) and a second optimised for graviton-like particles (the “spin-2” selection) which often have at least one photon close to the LHC proton beam axis.

Physics Briefing | 22 Mar 2016

Chasing after elusive B meson decays into muons

Almost four years following the discovery of the Higgs boson, LHC experiments are now more than ever exploring the possibility of new particles and new effects beyond the Standard Model.

Physics Briefing | 22 Mar 2016

Are there more Higgs bosons?

The results presented by the ATLAS collaboration during the Moriond Electroweak 2016 conference set new limits on a potential extended Higgs sector.

Physics Briefing | 22 Mar 2016

ATLAS presents new results at Moriond conference

This year’s 50th anniversary edition of the “Moriond Electroweak and Unified Theories” conference at La Thuile in Italy featured the presentation and discussion of first results from the LHC full-year 2015 data samples (“Run 2”) collected by the LHC experiments at unprecedented 13 TeV proton-proton collision energy.

News | 21 Mar 2016

Meet 7 inspiring women from the ATLAS experiment

Women play key roles in the ATLAS Collaboration: from young physicists at the start of their careers to analysis group leaders and spokespersons of the collaboration. Celebrate International Women’s Day by meeting a few of these inspiring ATLAS researchers.

News | 08 Mar 2016

ATLAS announces Thesis Award winners

On 25 February 2016 in CERN's Main Auditorium, the ATLAS collaboration announced the winners of the 2015 ATLAS Thesis Awards: Javier Montejo Berlingen, Ruth Pöttgen, Nils Ruthmann, and Steven Schramm. The winners were selected by the ATLAS Thesis Awards Committee for their outstanding contributions to the collaboration in the context of a PhD thesis. A total of 33 nominations were received, all of a very high standard and encompassing major achievements in all areas of ATLAS results and activities.

News | 03 Mar 2016

Recipients of the ATLAS PhD Grant announced

Three young physicists – Ruth Jacobs, Artem Basalaev and Nedaa B I Asbah – have been named the recipients of the 2015 ATLAS PhD Grant.

News | 26 Feb 2016

One week to do it all – Days 4-7: Diffractive data taking

On Thursday morning the first fill reached “Stable Beam”.

Blog | 19 Feb 2016

One week to do it all – Day 3: Preparing for Stable Beam

Tuesday at 23:55 I called the ATLAS shift leader and told them to stop the elastic physics run and ramp down the inner detector as the elastic program was over.

Blog | 18 Feb 2016

One week to do it all – Day 2: Elastic data-taking

No time to waste after the alignment.

Blog | 17 Feb 2016

One week to do it all – Day 1: Setting up

I have the pleasure to work for a very special sub-detector of ATLAS, called “Absolute luminosity For ATLAS” or ALFA in short.

Blog | 16 Feb 2016

The hills are alive, with the sound of gravitational waves

It’s 16:00 CET at CERN and I’m sitting in the CERN Main Auditorium. The room is buzzing with excitement, not unlike the day in 2012 when the Higgs discovery was announced in this very room. But today the announcement is not from CERN, but the LIGO experiment which is spread across two continents. Many expect the announcement to be about a discovery of gravitational waves, as predicted by Einstein in 1916, but which have remained elusive until today…

Blog | 15 Feb 2016

Heavy Ion Collision in ATLAS

ATLAS completes first year at 13 TeV

As 2015 draws to a close, the ATLAS experiment wraps up its first phase of operation at a record-breaking energy frontier.

News | 16 Dec 2015

ATLAS High Performance Computing Initiative Wins Award

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has awarded members of the ATLAS computing community first prize for their novel use of supercomputer infrastructure.

News | 11 Dec 2015

ATLAS Computing Infrastructure

Behind very great results lies great computing

At the ATLAS experiment, masterful computing infrastructure is transforming raw data from the detector into particles for analysis, with a set direction, energy and type.

News | 13 Nov 2015

New ATLAS results presented at Quark Matter 2015

Heavy-ion physics is the study of the hot dense medium created shortly after the Big Bang. Physicists examine this medium in three collision systems: lead-lead, proton-lead and proton-proton collisions.

News | 07 Oct 2015

New insight into the proton-proton ridge

The new results confirm that the ridges in proton-proton, proton-nucleus, and nucleus-nucleus collisions have a similar origin. The results also show that the observed weak dependence on the numbers of charged particles and the centre-of-mass energy should provide strong constraints on the mechanism responsible for producing the ridge in proton-proton, and, maybe, proton-nucleus collisions.

Physics Briefing | 02 Oct 2015

Top 2015: Mass, momentum and the conga

The top quark conference normally follows the same basic structure. The first few days are devoted to reports on the general status of the field and inclusive measurements; non-objectionable stuff that doesn’t cause controversy. The final few days are given over to more focused analyses; the sort of results that professors really enjoy arguing about.

Blog | 24 Sep 2015

Differential cross-section for top-quark pair production

ATLAS presents new top physics results

This week, physicists from around the world are gathering at the Top 2015 workshop in Ischia, Italy to discuss the latest measurements of the top quark. As the heaviest known fundamental particle, the top quark plays a special role in the search for "new physics".

News | 17 Sep 2015

The poster session, two hours in

TOP 2015: Top quarks come to Italy!

The annual top conference! This year we’re in Ischia, Italy. The hotel is nice, the pool is tropical and heated, but you don’t want to hear about that, you want to hear about the latest news in the Standard Model’s heaviest and coolest particle, the top quark! You won’t be disappointed.

Blog | 16 Sep 2015

Lepton-Photon Conference Participants

Leptons & photons meet dragons, castles and multiverses in Ljubljana

The XXVII edition of this classic conference (Lepton-Photon) brought together more than 200 scientists from around the world in the lovely city of Ljubljana, Slovenia. This year’s edition was a bit special, as it featured poster presentations that gave young researchers (including many ATLAS members) the opportunity to show their work.

Blog | 04 Sep 2015

Shedding new light on the Higgs

Today, at the Large Hadron Collider Physics conference (LHCP2015), the ATLAS and CMS collaborations presented the most precise measurements yet of Higgs boson properties. By combining Run 1 data from both experiments, the new measurements paint a clear picture of how the Higgs boson is produced, decays, and interacts with other particles.

Press Statement | 01 Sep 2015

Lepton Photon 2015: Into the dragon’s lair

This was my first time in Ljubljana, the capital city of Slovenia – a nation rich with forests and lakes, and the only country that connects the Alps, the Mediterranean and the Pannonian Plain. The slight rain was not an ideal welcome, but knowing that such an important conference that was to be held there – together with a beautiful evening stroll – relaxed my mind.

Blog | 29 Aug 2015

The main building of the University of Ljubljana

Lepton Photon 2015

This was my first time in Ljubljana, the capital city of Slovenia – a nation rich with forests and lakes, and the only country that connects the Alps, the Mediterranean and the Pannonian Plain. The slight rain was not an ideal welcome, but knowing that such an important conference that was to be held there - together with a beautiful evening stroll - relaxed my mind.

Blog | 28 Aug 2015

Dragon sculpture in Ljubljana

Getting ready for the next discovery

I’m just on my way back home after a great week spent in Ljubljana where I joined (and enjoyed!) the XXVII edition of the Lepton-Photon conference. During the Lepton-Photon conference many topics were discussed, including particle physics at colliders, neutrino physics, astroparticle physics as well as cosmology.

Blog | 25 Aug 2015

the density of allowed supersymmetric models before and after the ATLAS Run-1 searches

Devouring dark matter theories

Most of the matter in the universe is made not of stuff we understand, but of invisible “dark matter” particles. We have yet to observe these mysterious particles on Earth, presumably because they interact so weakly with normal matter. The high energy collisions in the Large Hadron Collider provide our best current hope of making dark matter particles, and thus giving us a better understanding what most of the universe is made of.

Physics Briefing | 24 Aug 2015

Ratio of W+ to W- boson production fiducial cross sections

Probing inside the proton

W and Z bosons are the massive carriers of the weak force, responsible for radioactive decays. These bosons also couple closely to the Higgs boson. W and Z bosons are produced at a large rate in proton-proton collisions at the LHC, where ATLAS physicists have now measured the rates for W and Z boson production using 13 TeV proton-proton collisions

Physics Briefing | 17 Aug 2015

The inelastic cross section, as measured in this work, versus the collision energy

Measuring the way protons interact at 13 TeV

One of the most basic quantities in particle physics, the rate at which protons scatter off of one another (the cross section), cannot be calculated from the theory of strong interactions, quantum chromodynamics. It must instead be measured, and those measurements can then be used to tune the numerical models of LHC proton–proton collisions.

Physics Briefing | 17 Aug 2015

Particle Fever

BOOST outreach and Particle Fever

Conferences like BOOST are designed to bring physicists to think about the latest results in the field. When you put 100 experts from around the world together into a room for a week, you get a fantastic picture of the state of the art in searches for new physics and measurements of the Standard Model.

Blog | 15 Aug 2015

Chicago at night

A boost for the next discovery

I arrived in Chicago for my first conference after the first long LHC shutdown, where new results from the two big experiments ATLAS and CMS were to be shown. Before the beginning of the conference on Monday, I had one day to fight against jetlag and see the city – certainly not enough time to see everything!

Blog | 14 Aug 2015

Rejection of quark and gluon jets for a 50% W boson selection efficiency

ATLAS ready to “boost” Run 2 physics

A new set of techniques is being used to identify highly energetic top quarks, W and Z bosons, and Higgs bosons decaying to quarks and, ultimately, to hadrons measured in ATLAS. Signatures of these “boosted” Standard Model particles are particularly useful when searching for massive new particles and measuring processes at high energies.

Physics Briefing | 12 Aug 2015

Boost and never look back!

Boost and never look back

When I arrived in Chicago this last Sunday for the BOOST conference I had a pretty good idea what new results we were going to show from ATLAS. I also had some rough ideas of what our friends from the other experiments and theory groups would be up to. What I didn’t expect was to see an ad that would fit the conference so nicely!

Blog | 12 Aug 2015

Q&A with EPS Outreach Award-Winner Kate Shaw

ATLAS Outreach Co-coordinator Kate Shaw has been awarded the 2015 European Physical Society (EPS) Outreach prize "for her contributions to the International Masterclasses and for her pioneering role in bringing them to countries with no strong tradition in particle physics".

News | 12 Aug 2015

New neighbour for ATLAS Tilecal prototypes

There's a new resident in ATLAS' Tile Hadronic Calorimeter (Tilecal) development laboratory: the last surviving UA2 central calorimeter module. After years at CERN's Microcosm exhibition, the module has found a new home next to prototype ATLAS Tilecals. Side-by-side, they illustrate the progress in sampling organic scintillator calorimeters over the past 35 years.

News | 06 Aug 2015

ATLAS control room

A summer evening in the ATLAS control room

The sun has already set over Geneva when I finally walk out from the ATLAS control room. We have been waiting for beams to be injected into the machine since the early hours of the afternoon, but without much success so far. Just a regular day for the most ambitious particle accelerator mankind has ever built, but a pretty boring afternoon for our entire shift crew.

Blog | 04 Aug 2015

ATLAS Overview Week in Marrakech in 2013

From ATLAS Around the World: Brief history of Morocco in ATLAS

In 1996, Morocco officially became a member of the ATLAS collaboration. The eagerly awaited day had finally arrived, and the first Arabic and African country signed a collaborative agreement with CERN to participate in the great scientific adventure of particle physics.

Blog | 31 Jul 2015

Average ATLAS charged-particle multiplicity

Physics and performance with 13 TeV proton collisions

After a shutdown of more than two years, Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has restarted with proton–proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. This new phase will allow the LHC experiments to explore nature and probe the physical laws governing it at scales never reached before.

News | 30 Jul 2015

This new result at 13 TeV (red circle) is compared to previous results from ATLAS

Top quarks in Run 2 are spot on

With a precision of just under 14% − currently dominated by our ability to understand how many proton-proton collisions have occurred at ATLAS (i.e. luminosity) − this measurement is able to confirm that quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong interaction, still seems to be going strong!

Physics Briefing | 27 Jul 2015

Murrough Landon and Manuel discussing results from the beam splashes

From ATLAS Around the World: Triggers (and dark) matter

To the best of our knowledge, it took the Universe about 13.798 billion years to allow funny looking condensates of mostly oxygen, carbon and hydrogen to ponder on their own existence. Some particularly curious specimens became scientists, founded CERN, dug several rings into the ground near Geneva, Switzerland, built the Large Hadron Collider, and also installed a handful of large detectors along the way.

Blog | 27 Jul 2015

Lepton transverse momentum distribution from the W→ μν selection

Of mesons and bosons

ATLAS is ready for detailed physics studies. The experiment used early data collected from the LHC’s Run 2 to calibrate its detectors. Measurements of the production and leptonic decay of certain particle resonances have shown that the detectors and software are working as expected.

Physics Briefing | 24 Jul 2015

Inclusive-jet cross sections as a function of the jet pT

First measurements set the stage for early searches of new physics

Jets are collimated sprays of hadrons generated from quarks and gluons, produced either directly in the proton-proton collision or as a part of the decay of W bosons, Z bosons, Higgs bosons, top quarks or new particles yet to be discovered. In fact, all W, Z and Higgs bosons decay most often to quarks which form jets.

Physics Briefing | 24 Jul 2015

Two-particle correlations

ATLAS measurements of the ridge in proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV

Previous studies of two-particle angular correlations in proton-proton, proton-lead, and lead-lead collisions at the LHC have provided important insight on the physics of the particle production process. On 24 July, Atlas presented new preliminary measurements of two-particle correlations...

Physics Briefing | 24 Jul 2015

The average charged-particle multiplicity as a function of the centre-of-mass energy

Early Run 2 results test event generator energy extrapolation

On 23 July 2015, ATLAS presented its first measurements of soft strong interaction processes using charged particles produced in proton–proton collisions at 13 TeV centre-of-mass energy delivered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. These measurements were performed with a dataset collected beginning of June under special low-luminosity conditions.

Physics Briefing | 22 Jul 2015

EPS-HEP 2015

First Run 2 results to be presented at EPS

The first results using the record-breaking Run 2 data will be presented at the European Physical Society conference on High Energy Physics (EPS-HEP) in Vienna, 22-29 July. It will be an exciting opportunity to see how these first few weeks of data-taking have progressed.

News | 20 Jul 2015

Musical Dimensions

CERN will be back at the Montreux Jazz Festival for its third annual workshop: 'The Physics of Music and The Music of Physics' on 9 July at 15:00 in Petit Palais. Live events from the ATLAS experiment mapped into music will feature as part of the event.

Run 2 of the LHC began this spring, bringing with it hopes and promise of new physics and discovery. One of many key items on the LHC shopping list is the existence of new spatial dimensions, a potential means to harmonise gravity in our theoretical understanding of nature.

News | 09 Jul 2015

Workers assembling the ATLAS SemiConductor Tracker

From ATLAS Around the World: Working with silicon in Japan

I joined the ATLAS experiment in 2012 after graduating from the University of Tokyo, however my previous experience was completely different from collider physics. During my Master’s course, I focused on the behaviour of a kind of silicon detector operated in Geiger mode. At that time, the experiments at CERN looked like a “castle” to me.

Blog | 03 Jul 2015

ATLAS awards Long Shutdown 1 achievements

The ATLAS Outstanding Achievement Awards 2015 were presented on 18 June to 26 physicists and engineers, in 11 groups, for their excellent work carried out during Long Shutdown 1 (LS1).

News | 25 Jun 2015

From ATLAS Around the World: Faster and faster!

Faster and Faster! This is how it gets as soon as LS1 ends and the first collisions of LHC Run 2 approaches. As you might have noticed, at particle physics experiments we LOVE acronyms! LS1 stands for the first Long Shutdown of the Large Hadron Collider.

Blog | 24 Jun 2015

Projecting pARTicles in Cuba

From Ars Electronica-style festivals to artists in residence programmes at scientific organisations, "art meets science" is a term that just keeps on trending. ATLAS visiting artist Agnes Chavez has taken a fresh look at the merging of the disciplines, adding a new one to the mix: "Art meets Science meets Education".

News | 22 Jun 2015

Display of one of the events selected as a candidate W’ event decaying to WZ.

Run 1 search for new massive bosons builds excitement for Run 2

The ATLAS experiment is now taking data from 13 TeV proton-proton collisions. The increased collision energy and rate in these Run 2 collisions will allow physicists to carry out stronger tests of many theoretical conjectures, including several theories that predict more massive versions of force-carrying particles like the W and Z bosons.

Physics Briefing | 19 Jun 2015

Impressions from the control room

As final preparations were made for the start of the Large Hadron Collider's (LHC) Run 2, the ATLAS Control Room was the centre of activity. Here are images from the three days that were landmark events...

News | 17 Jun 2015

ATLAS Proton-Proton Collision at 13 TeV

Setting off to new energy horizons

After a shutdown of more than two years, Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is restarting at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV for proton–proton collisions and increased luminosity. This new phase will allow the LHC experiments to explore nature and probe the physical laws governing it at scales never reached before.

News | 04 Jun 2015

ATLAS begins recording physics data at 13 TeV

Today ATLAS and other particle physics experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began recording physics data from 13 TeV proton collisions, which allow for precision studies of the Higgs boson and other Standard Model particles, as well as the search for new particles with higher masses. The new data will bring a deeper understanding of nature.

Press Statement | 03 Jun 2015

ATLAS Cavern - Dec 2014

Review before Run 2

ATLAS is ready for Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) where proton beams will be collided together at a higher centre of mass collision energy of 13 TeV, and reach higher luminosities than ever before.

News | 01 Jun 2015

<Serkant|Bosphorus|Erkcan>

From ATLAS Around the World: The oldest observer state of CERN is no longer just observing!

If you have ever been to a bazaar in Turkey, you would know that you have to bargain hard and you have to carefully examine what you buy. Sometimes this attitude goes way too far. In our case about half a century… Turkey had been an observer state of CERN since 1961 but as of 6 May 2015.

Blog | 26 May 2015

ATLAS records first test collisions at 13 TeV

On 20 May at around 22:24, ATLAS recorded the first 13 TeV test collisions delivered by the Large Hadron Collider. The proton collisions set a new high energy record, marking the beginning of ATLAS' journey into unexplored physics frontiers as we prepare for production data-taking, scheduled to start in early June.

News | 22 May 2015

The humble telescope I used at high school pointed me both to the past and to the future

From ATLAS Around the World: First blog from Hong Kong

Guess who ATLAS’ youngest member is? It’s Hong Kong! We will be celebrating our first birthday in June, 2015. The Hong Kong ATLAS team comprises members from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), The University of Hong Kong (HKU) and The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), under the the Joint Consortium for Fundamental Physics.

Blog | 19 May 2015

Coordination for collisions

There is the Large Hadron Collider and then there are its experiments. When the collider is ready to circulate proton beams, the experiments have to be ready to receive them.

News | 14 May 2015

From ATLAS Around the World: African horizons

It’s great being back at CERN and being able to immerse myself in the tangible atmosphere of excited anticipation for the first collisions at 13 TeV this June. I am a South African, usually based in Durban — a city currently afflicted with xenophobically motivated riots and rolling blackouts. Being at CERN is really a different world right now, to a greater extent than usual.

Blog | 08 May 2015

First collisions at injection energy

On the morning of 5 May 2015, ATLAS recorded the first scheduled proton beam collisions since the Large Hadron Collider and its experiments started up after two years of maintenance and repairs.

News | 08 May 2015

All the CoEPP workshop attendees outside MONA, Hobart.

From ATLAS Around the World: A view from Down Under

While ATLAS members at CERN were preparing for Run 2 during ATLAS week, and eagerly awaiting the beam to re-circulate the LHC, colleagues “down under” in Australia were having a meeting of their own. The ARC Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at the Terascale (CoEPP) is the hub of all things ATLAS in Australia.

Blog | 16 Apr 2015

Splashes for synchronization

ATLAS uses "beam splash" events to provide simultaneous signals to large parts of the detector, and verify that the readout of different detectors elements are fully synchronized. After the first 2015 Large Hadron Collider beam circulation on Easter Sunday, a run dedicated to taking beam splash events was set up on Tuesday evening, 7 April.

News | 15 Apr 2015

From ATLAS Around the World: Preparing for Run 2 from Colombia

After a two-year stay at CERN, I moved back to Colombia in 2012. Being involved in ATLAS and working from Colombia has been a great experience for me; I get to continue contributing to the physics searches and also do other things like teaching, giving seminars, and doing outreach activities.

Blog | 09 Apr 2015

Shots from the Long Shutdown

As ATLAS gears up to record data from proton collisions delivered by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at an unprecedented energy level, here are glimpses from the last two years of preparations.

News | 08 Apr 2015

A week of firsts

The annual conference, Moriond, is in its 50th edition this year, and I’ve had the pleasure of coming down to Aosta in Italy to participate in the QCD session; for the first time. It’s actually a week of firsts for me. The conference organizers described it as being in a kind of “QCD confinement”.

Blog | 07 Apr 2015

Beam Splash in ATLAS

ATLAS is ready and waiting for collisions

The first long shutdown of the Large Hadron Collider has now ended, after two years of intense but careful activity refurbishing and improving many aspects of ATLAS, mirroring the work to prepare the LHC for collisions at the new energy of 13 TeV.

Press Statement | 06 Apr 2015

New physics and Italian food

Moriond Electroweak: physics, skiing and Italian food

If you’re a young physicist working in high energy physics, you realize very soon in your career that “going for Moriond” and “going to Moriond” are two different things, and that neither of the two means that you’re actually going to Moriond. This year’s “Moriond Electroweak” was held in the Italian mountain resort of La Thuile, and had a special significance.

Blog | 30 Mar 2015

The coupling of the Higgs boson to fermions and bosons as a function of the particle’s mass.

ATLAS further verifies Standard Model coupling/mass relationship of Higgs boson

The discovery of a Higgs Boson in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS experiments marked a key milestone in the history of particle physics. It confirmed a long-standing prediction of the Standard Model, the theory that underlines our present understanding of elementary particles and their interactions.

Physics Briefing | 27 Mar 2015

Angular observables sensitive to the spin and parity of a Higgs boson decay.

The scalar boson

The ATLAS experiment has released results confirming that the Higgs boson has spin 0 (it is a so-called “scalar”) and positive parity as predicted by the Standard Model, making it the only elementary scalar particle to be observed in nature.

Physics Briefing | 26 Mar 2015

Candidate event in the search for a Higgs boson produced together with a top-antitop quark pair.

In search of rare Higgs boson production with top quarks

In proton-proton collisions, several processes can lead to the production of a Higgs boson. The most “frequent” process (which is about one collision in four billion!) is the fusion of two gluons, contained in the initial protons, into a Higgs boson through a “top-quark loop”. Least frequent is a mode where the Higgs boson is produced in association with a pair of top-quarks.

Physics Briefing | 24 Mar 2015

Latest ATLAS results on the Higgs Boson

On 17 March, ATLAS presented their latest Higgs physics results at an LHC seminar at CERN from data collected during the LHC's first run. The updated results include searches for the Higgs boson in association with top quarks, measurements of the spin and parity, and improved and combined coupling measurements, all showing good compatibility with Standard Model predictions. These results are also being presented at the 50th Rencontres de Moriond ElectroWeak conference, in La Thuile, Italy, this week.

News | 19 Mar 2015

LHC experiments join forces to zoom in on the Higgs boson

Today during the 50th session of “Rencontres de Moriond” in La Thuile Italy, ATLAS and CMS presented for the first time a combination of their results on the mass of the Higgs boson.

Press Statement | 17 Mar 2015

ATLAS physicist wins L'Oreal-UNESCO Women in Science award

Rajaâ Cherkaoui El Moursli is one of the five laureates of the L'Oreal-UNESCO for Women in Science Awards this year.

News | 12 Mar 2015

ATLAS' Higgs ML Challenge data open to public

The dataset from the ATLAS Higgs Machine Learning Challenge has been released on the CERN Open Data Portal.

News | 05 Mar 2015

Winners of the ATLAS Thesis Awards announced

Six PhD students were announced as the winners of the ATLAS Thesis Awards 2014 from 28 nominations received. The winners – Andrew Chisholm, Kun Liu, Marcus Morgenstern, Priscilla Pani, Dennis Perepelitsa, and James Saxon – were given certificates and an engraved glass model of the ATLAS detector during a ceremony on 19 February 2015 at CERN, Geneva.

News | 27 Feb 2015

Second ATLAS PhD Grants

The recipients of the second ATLAS PhD Grant were announced last week. The three young ATLAS physicists – Danijela Bogavac, Silvia Fracchia, and Declan Millar – were given certificates at a small ceremony at CERN, Geneva.

News | 23 Feb 2015

Looking at the Dark side of Matter

The search continues for dark matter, a new kind of matter that doesn’t emit or absorb light. It is assumed to account for the missing amount of mass in our Universe. The total mass in our Universe can be inferred from the observation of gravitational effects of stars in galaxies, and galaxies in clusters of galaxies. However the amount of mass calculated from the observed distribution of light is much less. It is proposed that dark matter makes up the discrepancy as it does not emit light.

Physics Briefing | 19 Feb 2015

Cleaning ATLAS cables

The Ties That Bind

A few weeks ago, I found myself in one of the most beautiful places on earth: wedged between a metallic cable tray and a row of dusty cooling pipes at the bottom of Sector 13 of the ATLAS Detector at CERN. My wrists were scratched from hard plastic cable ties, I had an industrial vacuum strapped to my back, and my only light came from a battery powered LED fastened to the front of my helmet. It was beautiful.

Blog | 15 Jan 2015

ATLAS collision event with two charm-tagged jets.

In search of super charm

If all the experimental evidence supports a theory, why should anyone want to dream up additional particles? Yet exactly this situation arose in the late 1960s. At that time, when the complete table of the known hadrons could be explained with just three quarks, theorists were already proposing a fourth, which they whimsically called “charm”.

Physics Briefing | 09 Jan 2015

After subtracting off the background from the data, the boson-pairs are clearly visible in the data!

The Art of Rediscovery

When I tell people I’m a particle physicist, one of the most frequent questions I get asked is: “So, have you discovered anything?” Funnily, I’ve spent much of the past two years trying to rediscover something that’s already been seen before. In today’s world, which fetishizes the New, this may seem slightly lame, but just because we’ve discovered something, doesn’t mean we’ve fully understood it.

Blog | 07 Jan 2015

ATLAS Muon Big Wheel

Handing In the ATLAS Keys

After completing more than 250 work packages concerning the whole detector and experimental site, the ATLAS and CERN teams involved with Long Shutdown 1 (LS1) operations are now wrapping things up before starting the commissioning phase in preparation for the Large Hadron Collider's restart. The giant detector is now more efficient, safer and even greener than ever thanks to the huge amount of work carried out over the past two years.

News | 08 Dec 2014

"Dirt Detectives"

For five days last week, 110 ATLAS collaborators worked in 10 different shifts to help clean and inspect the detector and the cavern that houses it before the toroid magnets are turned on.

News | 05 Dec 2014

The ATLAS experiment on Scholarpedia

An overview of the ATLAS experiment written by physicists Monica Dunford and Peter Jenni has been published on Scholarpedia. The article is the first in the series on experimental high-energy physics that the editors of the subject hope to host on the website.

News | 03 Dec 2014

Join the Higgs Hunt

Higgs Hunters, the first particle physics venture on Zooniverse, a citizen science project, has been launched in collaboration with the University of Oxford, New York University and the ATLAS Experiment. Higgs Hunters invites online volunteers to participate in studying the properties of the new boson, which may hold clues as to what lies beyond our current understanding of the universe.

News | 01 Dec 2014

Machine Learning Wins the Higgs Challenge

The winner of the four-month long Higgs Machine Learning Challenge, launched on 12 May, is Gábor Melis from Hungary, followed closely by Tim Salimans from The Netherlands and Pierre Courtiol from France. They will receive cash prizes, sponsored by Paris-Saclay Centre for Data Science and Google, of $7000, $4000, and $2000 respectively. The three winners have been invited to participate at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference on 13 December in Canada.

News | 20 Nov 2014

Quenching jets in the hot dense matter produced by colliding lead ions

The Large Hadron Collider is known to collide protons, but for one month a year, beams of lead ions are circulated in the 27-km tunnel and made to collide in the centre of the experiments. The ATLAS experiment has made new precise measurements of the suppression of jets as they blast through the dense matter created by the lead ion collisions.

Physics Briefing | 13 Nov 2014

Defending Your Life (Part 3)

This is the last part of my attempt to explain our simulation software. You can read Part 1, about event generators, and Part 2, about detector simulation, if you want to catch up. Just as a reminder, we’re trying to help our theorist friend by searching for his proposed “meons” in our data.

Blog | 28 Oct 2014

ATLAS Awards Achievements in Run 1

The ATLAS Outstanding Achievement Awards 2014 were given on 9 October to five individuals or teams of physicists and engineers for their contributions during the Large Hadron Collider's first run in all areas of ATLAS except physics analyses.

News | 21 Oct 2014

Defending Your Life (Part 2)

I’ve been working on our simulation software for a long time, and I’m often asked “what on earth is that?” This is my attempt to help you love simulation as much as I do.

Blog | 20 Oct 2014

Five schools virtually visit ATLAS, CMS and IceCube

The ATLAS and CMS experiments hosted a virtual visit together with the IceCube Experiment in the South Pole for students from five different European schools on 2 October. The visit allowed the students to interact with researchers in both the LHC experiments and the IceCube experiment. The virtual visit was a second event in the Open Discovery Space project series' 'Bringing Frontier Science to Schools'.

News | 15 Oct 2014

New ATLAS precision measurements of the Higgs boson: Observation of WW decay

The Standard Model makes many different predictions regarding the production and decay properties of the Higgs boson, most of which can be tested at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Since the discovery, experimentalists from the ATLAS collaboration have analysed the complete dataset recorded in 2011 and 2012, have improved the calibration of the detector, and have increased substantially the sensitivity of their analyses.

Physics Briefing | 07 Oct 2014

Doing Physics in Vietnam

One of the perks of working in our field is the opportunities we get to go to exotic places for conferences. I always felt the HEP-MAD conference in Madagascar would top this list, but the one some of us went to in Vietnam can't be too far behind. The Rencontres du Vietnam conference series has been organised in the coastal town of Quy Nhon since 2011, covering different physics topics. This year, one of them was titled Physics at the LHC and Beyond, where I had the privilege of presenting ATLAS soft QCD results.

Blog | 07 Oct 2014

Defending Your Life (Part 1)

Having spent many hours working on the simulation software in ATLAS, I thought this would be a good place to explain what on earth that is (H/T to Al Brooks for the title). Our experiment wouldn’t run without the simulation, and yet there are few people who really understand it.

Blog | 05 Oct 2014

Searches for new physics with photons produced at vertices displaced from the collision point

Theories, such as supersymmetry, propose the existence of new types of particles to explain important questions about the universe, such as the nature of dark matter. ATLAS has performed a search for one such type – exotic heavy particles that have lifetimes long enough that they travel partway through the detector before decaying, at what is called a displaced vertex.

Physics Briefing | 22 Sep 2014

Higgs boson production measurements from the channels of discovery

The discovery of the Higgs boson by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations in 2012 marked a new era in particle physics because it completed the Standard Model and gave us another tool to explore territories beyond. The Standard Model predicts precisely the interactions of the Higgs boson to all other elementary particles once its mass is measured.

Physics Briefing | 10 Sep 2014

First observation of Z-boson production via weak-boson fusion

The fusion of two weak bosons is an important process that can be used to probe the electroweak sector of the Standard Model. Measurements of Higgs production via weak-boson fusion are crucial for precise extraction of the Higgs-boson couplings and have the potential to help pin down the charge conjugation and parity of the Higgs boson. A similar process, weak-boson scattering, is sensitive to alternative electroweak symmetry-breaking models and to anomalous weak-boson gauge couplings. These processes are extremely rare and the experimental observation of the production of heavy bosons via weak-boson fusion has become possible only recently with the large centre-of-mass energy and luminosity provided by the LHC. Extracting the signals from the huge backgrounds in the high pile-up conditions at the LHC is a major challenge.

Physics Briefing | 10 Sep 2014

ATLAS finds evidence for the rare electroweak W±W± production

The Standard Model of particle physics has been extremely successful in predicting a vast variety of phenomena – so successful, that it is easy to forget that some of its predictions have not yet been verified. A very important one, related intimately to electroweak symmetry breaking, is that the gauge bosons (γ, W and Z) can interact with each other through quartic interactions.

Physics Briefing | 10 Sep 2014

ATLAS Physicist Wins Young Scientist Prize

For her contribution toward the discovery of the Higgs boson, Kerstin Tackmann was awarded the Young Scientist Prize in Particle Physics 2014 by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics.

News | 21 Aug 2014

Identity problems

An obligatory eye scan is required for all ATLAS underground personnel entering the experimental cavern. The iris recognition is performed by the IrisID iCAM7000. Its only point in life is to keep track of who enters and leaves the Zone. It sounds like a simple task for such an advanced technology, but -- like most things in the world of research -- it's never without some hiccups.

Blog | 25 Jul 2014

Probing Higgs boson production properties

ATLAS has measured properties of events likely to contain a Higgs boson, in order to get a better understanding of the frequency and manner in which they are produced. The study specifically examines the fiducial and differential cross sections for Higgs bosons that decay into two photons or into two Z bosons, using proton-proton collisions recorded by ATLAS in 2012.

Physics Briefing | 17 Jul 2014

The Higgs boson’s shadow

ATLAS physicists have studied the “shadow” of the Higgs boson far above its mass peak in an analysis of the full sample of 8 TeV proton-proton collisions delivered by the LHC in 2012. The study involves Higgs boson decays into two Z bosons, which themselves decay into four charged leptons or two charged leptons plus two neutrinos. Among other interesting properties, it provides new insight into the lifetime, or natural width, of the Higgs boson.

Physics Briefing | 14 Jul 2014

The WW cross-section: a high flyer

The production of pairs of heavy bosons, such as two Z bosons, a Z and a W boson, or the more challenging pair of W bosons (WW), are processes that particle physicists are passionate about because they cover a rich spectrum of phenomena. The WW channel, in particular, represents a substantial experimental challenge. In the events considered for this measurement, each W boson decays into an electron or a muon plus a neutrino that remains undetected and is reconstructed through the presence of missing energy in the event.

Physics Briefing | 08 Jul 2014

Are quarks fundamental particles?

From decades of discoveries made at particle colliders, we know that protons are composed of quarks bound together by gluons. We also know that there are six kinds of quarks, each one with its associated antiparticle. But are quarks fundamental? ATLAS searched for signs that quarks may have substructure in its most recent data, collected from the LHC’s proton-proton collisions in 2012.

Physics Briefing | 06 Jul 2014

Counting collisions with ALFA

Data from a special run of the LHC using dedicated beam optics at 7 TeV have been analysed to measure the total cross-section of proton-proton collisions in ATLAS. Using the Absolute Luminosity For ATLAS (ALFA), a Roman Pot sub-detector located 240 metres from the collision point, ATLAS has determined the cross-section with unprecedented precision to be σtot (pp → X) = 95.4 ± 1.4 millibarn.

Physics Briefing | 05 Jul 2014

W + jets plot

The production of W bosons in association with jets

The production of a W boson in association with “jets” of particles initiated by quarks or gluons (“W+jets” events) is an important signature to test quantum chromodynamics, the theory of strong interactions. A new measurement reported by ATLAS focuses on studying the properties of the jets in a large data sample of W+jets events.

Physics Briefing | 05 Jul 2014

A new state of beauty and charm

ATLAS has observed a particle state of mass and decay properties consistent with expectations for an excited state of the Bc meson. The discovery follows analysis of the full 7 TeV and 8 TeV proton-proton collision data sets from the LHC’s first run.

Physics Briefing | 05 Jul 2014

Hunting for the top squark

Completion of the analysis of 2012 data recorded by the ATLAS detector at the LHC’s collision energy of 8 TeV has significantly improved our capability of finding a supersymmetric partner of the top quark – also known as the top squark or the stop.

Physics Briefing | 05 Jul 2014

Second anniversary of the Higgs boson discovery!

It’s been two years since the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN jointly announced the discovery of a new boson consistent with the Higgs particle of the Standard Model. Since then, the Higgs boson has been intensely examined. We’ve measured its spin, its mass, its lifetime, and observed its decay into bosons and fermions. In the next run of the Large Hadron Collider, we hope to learn more about how it interacts with other particles and to make many more precise measurements of its properties. By doing, we hope to extend the limits of our current understanding of the fundamental components of nature, and to seek clues for discovery.

News | 04 Jul 2014

Music of the "LHC"

The ATLAS & CMS experiments celebrate the second anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson. Here, are some images of the path from the LHC's startup to the Nobel Prize, featuring a musical composition by Roger Zare, performed by the Donald Sinta Quartet, called 'LHC'. Happy Discovery Day!

News | 04 Jul 2014

Measuring top production in the LHC

Using the full data sample from the LHC’s first run of proton-proton collisions, ATLAS has measured the production rate of top and anti-top quarks.

Physics Briefing | 03 Jul 2014

New evidence for top quark pairs produced with W or Z bosons

Evidence for the production of a W or Z boson together with a top quark pair, referred to as tt̄W and tt̄Z processes, has been found in the ATLAS analysis of the 8 TeV data from the LHC’s first run.

Physics Briefing | 03 Jul 2014

Precise measurement of the Higgs boson mass

The ATLAS Collaboration has analysed its full Run 1 data sample of seven and eight TeV (tera electron Volts) proton-proton collisions delivered by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), to produce an accurate measurement of the Higgs boson mass. The Higgs boson resonance appears as a narrow peak in the mass spectra of its decays to two photons or to four charged leptons, as shown in the two figures below.

Physics Briefing | 03 Jul 2014

The Symphony of ATLAS

Bringing the nine-storey high, many-layered ATLAS detector back to life and preparing it for the Large Hadron Collider's next run is a complex task. Each sub-detector is setup and thoroughly tested before they are joined and the detector as a whole can begin recording data again.

News | 23 Jun 2014

Taking stock at the LHCP conference

I felt like I was returning home as I walked through the gates of Columbia University at 116th Street and Broadway, the day before the LHCP conference began. The scaffolding from the recently completed graduation ceremonies reminded me of my own PhD graduation thirteen years ago. The ubiquitous Columbia-blue signs of "Welcome back Alumni" seemed to be talking just to me.

Blog | 17 Jun 2014

Are You Up for the Higgs Challenge?

It's been four weeks since the four-month long Higgs Machine Learning Challenge was announced. Almost 700 teams have signed up and more than 200 have beaten the in-house benchmark already.

News | 16 Jun 2014

LHCPlanning for the future

As someone who comes from a small mountain town, for many years I've linked the word 'summer' to 'seaside' and 'sun'. During my experience as a physicist working in ATLAS, I found myself associating the word 'conferences' to the word 'summer' more often than to the two above.

Blog | 16 Jun 2014

Notes from Underground: IBL vs Brazil Championship

Previously in Notes from Underground, Dave Robinson wrote in some detail about the work going on inside the ATLAS Detector, and Clara Nellist wrote about the inner detector of ATLAS, discussing the different types of detection units or Sensors (Planars & 3D). I will continue to delve into the exciting world of the inner detector with its brand new Insertable B-Layer (IBL) and its related parts.

Blog | 09 Jun 2014

Higgs Mass to String Balls

ATLAS presented new results at the Large Hadron Collider Physics (LHCP) Conference in Columbia University, New York, 2 to 7 June. Many new searches and improved measurements were presented, among which were an updated Higgs boson mass measurement, a search for double Higgs boson production and new searches for Supersymmetry and exotic phenomena.

News | 06 Jun 2014

A New Sub Detector for ATLAS

Closest to the beam pipe where particle collisions will occur in the very heart of ATLAS, a new sub-detector – the Insertable B-Layer – was put in place on 7 May. The IBL team had been developing and practicing the insertion procedure and tooling for two years because of the operation’s delicate nature.

News | 02 Jun 2014

New results from ATLAS at Quark Matter 2014

ATLAS has prepared a variety of new results for the Quark Matter 2014 conference using lead-lead (Pb+Pb) and proton-lead (p+Pb) data collected during Run1.

News | 30 May 2014

ATLAS Book Wins the IPPY Awards

"Hunting the Higgs", published by Papadakis Publishers in collaboration with the ATLAS Experiment won the Bronze prize in the Science category of the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

News | 29 May 2014

ATLAS Cavern Banjo Video Wins Third Place

News | 27 May 2014

Notes from underground: Pixel prototypes

In last week’s post for this Notes from Underground series, David talked about the work that goes on in the ATLAS pit. I'm going to take a step back and talk about what happens before a detector is installed. Although the work I want to tell you about didn't technically take place underground, much of it was performed in what is essentially a large airport hangar without natural light, so it certainly feels like you’re 100m down!

Blog | 27 May 2014

Notes from Underground: Servicing Silicon

We physicists refer to the vast underground cavern that houses the ATLAS experiment as ‘the pit’. That may be a strange term to use for a marvel of civil, mechanical and electrical engineering, but nonetheless there are parallels to what you might imagine a ‘pit’ to be. Working inside the ATLAS detector in the pit can be dark, sometimes hot and not suited to those with claustrophobia. It often involves climbing several sets of makeshift steps and gantries and crawling flat on your stomach through narrow gaps to get to the part of the detector where you need to be. You will be wearing a safety helmet with mounted lamp, steel toe-cap shoes, one or more dosimeters to monitor radiation exposure and even a harness, if working at heights. Not to mention tools, laptop and any equipment you need to do your job. You tend to recognize the experimental physicists, engineers and technicians who have just come up from the pit – they stand blinking in the sunlight with a tired and rather sweaty appearance.

Blog | 14 May 2014

"A hard day, with so much beauty"

ATLAS physicists travelled with Physics Without Frontiers 2014, a project run by International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), to three Palestinian universities this April to share the joy of scientific research with 140 students.

News | 13 May 2014

ATLAS Connects with Science Fest Visitors

On 5 and 6 April, Michigan State University's ATLAS physicists who are based at CERN connected virtually via video-conference to visitors attending the annual Science Festival in East Lansing, USA, to talk about particle physics and what it is like to be a physicist.

News | 29 Apr 2014

Unread section opened in the Standard Model book

While others are worrying that new physics might be running out of corners (see Eve Le Ménédeu's blog) we should not forget that even within the book of the Standard Model there are completely unread chapters. The Standard Model draws its success from the fascinating fact that its basic energy density formula, called Lagrangian, is uniquely defined by just specifying three fundamental symmetries.

Blog | 30 Mar 2014

Is new physics running out of corners?

Friday was the last occasion for Moriond participants to see new results on specific physics topics since Saturday is reserved for summary talks. The topic was 'Beyond the Standard Model' -- a very large subject, which covers an incredible number of theoretical models, from Supersymmetry to Two-Higgs-Doublet Models, two of the most discussed topics of the day.

Blog | 24 Mar 2014

Dark Matters

The winter conference season is well under way, and what better way to fill my first blog post than with a report from one of the premier conferences in particle and astroparticle physics: the Rencontres de Moriond.

Blog | 24 Mar 2014

The Neutrino Puzzle

Having explored the latest results on what we call 'heavy flavour' or physics of particles containing a b-quark (see The Penguin Domination by Jessica Levêque), we embarked on a much lighter subject: neutrinos.

Blog | 22 Mar 2014

No matter how hard you try... Standard is standard

The past two days of the Recontres de Moriond 2014 Electroweak conference have been very intense with many new experimental results, many insightful theoretical talks and many lively discussions. Since the topics cover neutrino experiments, astrophysical observations and Standard Model precision measurements, giving a summary is not an easy task. But I will try.

Blog | 22 Mar 2014

The Penguin Domination

This week features the 2014 Moriond Electroweak conference at La Thuile, Italy. More than a 100 particle physicists gather from all around the world. Started 50 years ago, this conference is still very valued, year after year, due to the high quality of the talks. The Moriond winter conference is one of the most exciting conferences, as all the particle physics experiments present their brand new results, but it is also appealing because of the mountains and the great Italian food.

Blog | 18 Mar 2014

Five Outstanding Students Win ATLAS Thesis Awards

The ATLAS Thesis Awards recognize some of our postdoctoral colleagues who have made exceptional contributions to the experiment, across all areas, in the context of a PhD thesis.

News | 25 Feb 2014

ATLAS PhD Grant Scholars Announced

The first recipients of the ATLAS PhD Grant were presented with a certificate on 11 February at CERN by the programme’s selection committee. The three scholars, Lailin Xu of China, Josefina Alconada of Argentina, and Gagik Vardanyan of Armenia, were delighted at being able to continue their PhD programmes at CERN.

News | 13 Feb 2014

Dealing With Data

In the first run of the Large Hadron Collider, almost a billion proton-proton collisions took place every second in the centre of the ATLAS detector. That amounts to enough data to fill 100,000 CDs each second. If you stacked the CDs on top of each other, in a year it would reach the moon four times. Only a small fraction of the observed proton–proton collisions have interesting characteristics that might lead to discoveries. How does ATLAS deal with this mountain of data?

News | 16 Jan 2014

Higgs into fermions

The ATLAS experiment released preliminary results on 26 Nov 2013 that show evidence, with a significance of 4.1 standard deviations that the Higgs boson decays to two taus, which are fermions. This is exciting news. But what makes this measurement important?

News | 26 Nov 2013

Full Coverage for ATLAS Muons

Hold out your hand and in one minute hundreds of muons will have passed through your palm. Muons are one of the high-energy cosmic ray particles that can pass through most solid structures – even the ATLAS detector’s calorimeter, which is designed to absorb particles and measure their energy. A specific system is required to measure muons. Until now, the ATLAS muon system was almost completed, but not quite. The last of the 62 chambers in the Extended Endcap (EE) region was installed just before summer this year.

News | 29 Oct 2013

Englert and Higgs get the Nobel

On 8 October, the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Professors François Englert and Peter Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider".

Press Statement | 23 Oct 2013

Letters from the Road

I've been lucky to get to make two workshop / conference stops on a trip that started at the very beginning of October. The first was at Kinematic Variables for New Physics, hosted at Caltech. Now I'm up at the Computing in High Energy Physics conference in Amsterdam. Going to conferences and workshops is a big part of what we do, in order to explain our work to others and share what great things we're doing, in order to hear the latest on other people's work, and - and this one is important - in order to get to talk with colleagues about what we should do next.

Blog | 18 Oct 2013

So where is all the SUSY?

Supersymmetry (SUSY) is one of the most loved, and most hated, theories around that works as an extension of our beloved Standard Model.

Blog | 04 Oct 2013

Crowds at ATLAS for CERN Open Days

More than 70,000 people visited CERN Open Days over the weekend, with 20,000 going underground to see the LHC tunnel and the detectors. Of these, an estimated 5,000 people visited the ATLAS exhibits aboveground, and another 2,500 had the opportunity to see the ATLAS detector.

News | 02 Oct 2013

Sharing the excitement of discovery

Only a few more days to go before CERN opens its doors and our universe becomes yours on 28 and 29 September. With 35 surface sites and seven underground visits available, there will be plenty of activities for visitors of all ages.

News | 23 Sep 2013

High-flying physics

Pernilla Craig earned her licence to fly last year aged just 17, making her one of UK’s youngest female pilots. A visit to CERN last week took her deep underground to see dectectors on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and into the sky above the Alps for a bird's eye view of the laboratory.

News | 11 Sep 2013

Snowmass from Afar

There's a (potentially) really big deal in physics that's just ended: the Snowmass conference. Ken over at the USLHC blog has already mentioned it, and I've been watching with interest from here in Geneva as well. The meeting, and its reports, are trying to walk an extrodinarily delicate line that's interesting for both the physics and the sociology involved.

Blog | 12 Aug 2013

A Few Missing Steps

After a long hiatus from US ATLAS, I recently started a new job at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. It's one of the few remaining labs in the US funded by the Department of Energy that does basic science research. It's the fourth job I've had in four years, all working on ATLAS, and all working on similar projects. This one is different, though: if I pass a performance review a few years from now, I'll have the lab-equivalent of tenure. I've had reactions ranging from "who did you have to kill to get that job" to "so who did you actually talk to to land that"?

Blog | 07 Aug 2013

New searches for SUSY

ATLAS today presented new searches for Supersymmetry, a theory that could explain the large amount of dark matter in the universe.

News | 20 Jul 2013

New results on the properties of the top quark

At the EPS HEP conference today, ATLAS released a new precise measurement of the top quark mass using events where both top quarks decay via W bosons to electrons or muons. ATLAS also presented limits on the possibility of the top quark decaying to channels not foreseen in the Standard Model. A comparison of the behaviour of top quarks and anti-top quarks produced at the LHC is in agreement with the prediction of the Standard Model, disfavouring models of new physics that require a large top/anti-top asymmetry.

News | 19 Jul 2013

New Results for EPS

ATLAS physicists will be presenting new results at the biennial Europhysics conference on High Energy Physics this year. The conference, which will take place 18 to 24 July in Stockholm, Sweden, is organized by the High Energy and Particle Physics Division of the European Physical Society (EPS).

Press Statement | 16 Jul 2013

Granting a wish

Callum Kerr, 17, visited the ATLAS cavern on 8 July, with this family and a representative from Make-A-Wish Foundation.

News | 10 Jul 2013

Everyone Here Is Motivated By Physics

In June 1993, ATLAS and CMS were given the provisional go-ahead to submit technical proposals. Twenty years later, for the discovery of the Higgs boson, the European Physical Society has awarded the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize 2013 to the research teams of the ATLAS and CMS experiments. For their “pioneering and outstanding leadership roles in the making” of the experiments, the prize also goes to ATLAS' Peter Jenni and CMS' Michel Della Negra and Tejinder Virdee. We talked to Peter Jenni, who was spokesperson of the ATLAS collaboration for the first 15 years, on ATLAS' past and future.

News | 17 Jun 2013

Want a small scale LEGO® version of the ATLAS detector?

A small scale version of the ATLAS detector can be made available as an official LEGO® product, but I need people to vote for it at LEGO Cuusoo. We need 10,000 votes to be considered by LEGO®.

Blog | 13 Jun 2013

Report from DIS 2013

The series of workshops named "Deep Inelastic Scattering (DIS)" started way back in Durham, UK in 1993. In the last twenty years, particle physics has evolved in many ways, and this years DIS held at Marseille between April 22-26th was a testament to that fact. While it was one of the biggest conference in terms of Standard Model physics talks from ATLAS, it included talks and latest results covering the full ATLAS (and other big LHC experiments) physics program.

Blog | 07 May 2013

Moriond EW feedback

"Moriond", that's an important keyword in our collaboration. It's the winter deadline for many analyses, the occasion to see first results with the whole set of data collected in the past year. An important conference, one of the milestones of the year.

Blog | 25 Apr 2013

What we learned from ATLAS at Les Rencontres de Moriond 2013

Les Rencontres de Moriond, an important conference for the worldwide community of particle physicists, took place from 2-16 March 2013 in La Thuile, Italy. Of all the scientists present, 22 ATLAS physicists had been invited to reveal the experiment's latest findings. What did we learn from this new ATLAS physics harvest?

News | 08 Apr 2013

ATLAS in the Italian Alps for the Rencontres de Moriond 2013

From March 2nd to March 16th 2013 the mythic "Rencontres de Moriond" is taking place in the Italian Alps at the La Tuile ski resort. For the 48th edition of this famous event, more than 420 physicists, theorists and experimentalists, young and more experienced, coming from the four corners of the planet get together in this pleasant environment to share their most recent results and ideas on particle physics. Twenty-two ATLAS physicists were invited to divulge the latest findings of the ATLAS Experiment.

News | 27 Feb 2013

2012: A Year for Science – A Year for Discovery

Amazing, incredible, emotional. These are uncommon words for summarizing the annual accomplishments of a particle physics experiment. Yet 2012 has been a fantastically uncommon year for ATLAS, one of the main experiments at CERN: marvellous machine performance, numerous and interesting physics results, plenty of interactions with students and general public, and - last but not least - a major discovery!

News | 20 Dec 2012

ATLAS in the Land of the Rising Sun for HCP 2012

From November 12th to November 16th, more than 250 particle physicists are gathering in Kyoto, Japan to share their latest results. One of the key international particle physics conferences of the year, the Hadron Collider Physics Symposium 2012 (HCP 2012), will take place this year in the Land of the Rising Sun.

News | 09 Nov 2012

Happy Birthday ATLAS!

Twenty years ago the name “ATLAS” was first used on an official document, the Letter of Intent, to refer to the detector which has been taking data for nigh on three years now, including those data on which the recent Higgs results were based. It has been two decades of growth, development and hard work, resulting in this year’s observation of a Higgs-like particle. All the more reason for the experiment to take a few moments to look back and celebrate.

News | 29 Sep 2012

TOP 2012 - Part 2

Welcome back, dedicated top quark enthusiast. I’m sure you’ve all been waiting on the edge of your seats for an update from TOP 2012, and I can now confirm that a combined team of LHC & Tevatron physicists narrowly beat a mixed team of physicists from LHC & Tevatron at croquet.

Blog | 26 Sep 2012

TOP 2012 - Part 1

Greetings from the TOP 2012 conference, Winchester UK! What’s a ‘Winchester’ I hear you asking? A type of gun? Indeed yes, though sadly not of the smoking variety that we’re all so keen to find. However in this particular case Winchester is a historical town in the south of England, complete with the typical rolling green fields, a cathedral, and the not so typical contingent of visiting physicists!

Blog | 18 Sep 2012

The Physics of Top Quarks

The 5th International Workshop on Top Quark Physics (TOP2012) will take place in Winchester, UK, from the 16th to the 21st of September. It will gather experts in the field of top quark physics as well as PhD students and will highlight the newest results and topics related to the physics of top quarks.

News | 11 Sep 2012

What should we know about the Higgs particle?

On the 4th of July, CERN announced the discovery of a new particle that can be interpreted as the Higgs boson with both the ATLAS and CMS experiments. Since this is one of the most important discoveries over the last 10 or 20 years in particle physics, let’s have a look to the full story.

Blog | 15 Aug 2012

ATLAS Heavy Ion Results Presented at QM 2012 in Washington, D.C.

The Quark Matter conference, which takes place every two years, is this year being organised in Washington, DC, USA on 13-18 August 2012 (QM2012). It will bring together both experimentalists and theorists from all over the world who are studying heavy ion physics at ultra high energies.

News | 13 Aug 2012

ATLAS Supersymmetry Searches and More at SUSY 2012 in Beijing

The 20th International Conference on Supersymmetry and Unification of Fundamental Interactions (SUSY 2012) is taking place in Beijing, China on 13 -18 August 2012. SUSY is the theory which, if confirmed by experiment, will be the high energy extension of the Standard Model (SM). In SUSY, every particle should have a massive "shadow" particle or super-partner. Experimentalists have been looking for years for proof of the existence of these SUSY particles or sparticles.

News | 13 Aug 2012

ATLAS Higgs Search Update

On 31 July, 2012, the ATLAS Experiment submitted a scientific paper describing the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs Boson to the journal Physics Letters B.

News | 31 Jul 2012

A new particle is born, but who is the father?

We have discovered a particle. It is perhaps the particle everybody has been looking for but, for now, let us just call it a particle possibly known as the Higgs.

Blog | 11 Jul 2012

ATLAS Results Presented Down Under at ICHEP 2012

Every other year, particle physicists gather together to share their latest results at the ICHEP (International Conference on High Energy Physics) conference. This year, more than 700 are attending the conference in Melbourne, Australia, July 4-11.

News | 09 Jul 2012

Melbourne Dispatch: A First Coming To Terms with Discovery

Where to begin? The 4th of July, 2012 will remain burned in the memories of those of us fortunate to be delegates at this historic 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics (#ICHEP2012) in beautiful Melbourne, Australia.

Blog | 09 Jul 2012

Very exciting day at CERN about the Higgs??!

Good morning science addicts and everyone! What a special day at CERN today! Indeed, the ATLAS and CMS experiments have just released some outstanding results and observations about the search for the Higgs boson, and the ATLAS and CMS spokespersons (Fabiola Gianotti, and Joe Incandela) just presented those results in the main auditorium at 9 a.m (CERN time).

Blog | 04 Jul 2012

Latest Results from ATLAS Higgs Search

On 4 July, 2012, the ATLAS experiment presented a preview of its updated results on the search for the Higgs Boson. The results were shown at a seminar held jointly at CERN and via video link at ICHEP, the International Conference for High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia, where detailed analyses will be presented later this week. At CERN, preliminary results were presented to scientists on site and via webcast to their colleagues located in hundreds of institutions around the world.

Press Statement | 04 Jul 2012

Latest ATLAS Results to be Presented Down Under at ICHEP 2012

Every other year, particle physicists gather together to share their latest results at the ICHEP (International Conference on High Energy Physics) conference. This year, more than 700 are attending the conference in Melbourne, Australia, July 4-11.

News | 02 Jul 2012

ATLAS to Present Updated Higgs Analysis Results in Upcoming Joint CERN / ICHEP Seminar

The ATLAS Experiment will be presenting its most recent results from searches for the Higgs Boson at the LHC in a dedicated seminar to be held at CERN on 4 July at 9:00 CET.

News | 29 Jun 2012

Quark Excitement: Is there anything smaller?

The Large Hadron Collider commands many superlatives. One of the most useful of these is that the LHC is our planet's most powerful human-built microscope. The higher the collision energy, the tinier the distances you can study.

Blog | 23 May 2012

What does 8 TeV mean?

Inspired by Regina Caputo’s excellent post on the CERN accelerator complex, I thought I should give you some fun facts about the LHC (in “human units”).

Blog | 11 Apr 2012

LHC 2012 Run at 8 TeV Has Started

The LHC 2012 run at a beam energy of 4 TeV has started, corresponding to a collision energy of 8 TeV, compared with the 7 TeV runs in 2010 and 2011. The data target for 2012 is 15 inverse femtobarns for ATLAS (and CMS), three times larger than the total until now. The LHC is scheduled to enter a long technical stop at the end of 2012 to prepare for running at its full design energy of around 7 TeV per beam.

Press Statement | 05 Apr 2012

Needle in a haystack

The LHC is designed to collide bunches of protons every 25 ns, i.e., at a 40 MHz rate (40 million/second). In each of these collisions, something happens. Since there is no way we can collect data at this rate, we try to pick only the interesting events, which occur very infrequently; however, this is easier said than done. Experiments like ATLAS employ a very sophisticated filtering system to keep only those events that we are interested in. This is called the trigger system, and it works because the interesting events have unique signatures that can be used to distinguish them from the uninteresting ones.

Blog | 16 Mar 2012

Moriond day 3: The day of the Higgs

(I'm not skipping day 2, about heavy flavors and my own talk, but I think today's topic merits a reshuffling)

Blog | 08 Mar 2012

Moriond day 2: Inverse time dilation

I work with crazy particles. Dark matter is pretty weird, so are neutrinos seemingly, but what I search for blows it all away. Tuesday was the day of my presentation. The format for these young scientist presentations are 5 minutes and time for a single question afterwards. Trying to present a full picture of any analysis in that short a time is impossible; instead the idea is more like handing out a business card telling the audience what you work on in the hope that some will be interested and contact you informally afterwards.

Blog | 06 Mar 2012

Moriond day 1: The outer limits

Not many trips take you to all ends of the world in one day, but that was nevertheless how it felt after the first talks at Moriond. Sunday and Monday have mainly featured presentations on neutrino and dark matter physics. Many of these experiments are placed in remote regions or deep under ground.

Blog | 05 Mar 2012

Mountains of Physics

Experimentalists and theorists are gathering once more in the Alps at La Thuile, Italy, March 3-17 for the annual "Rencontres de Moriond" to discuss latest results in particle physics and cosmology.

News | 05 Mar 2012

Mystical Moriond

As a young physicist not many conferences have the same mystical status as Rencontres de Moriond. This gathering of physicists from all areas of particle physics is one of most anticipated events of the year. More a gathering than a conference, Moriond started in 1966 and has inspired many similar events. Presentations, time for discussion and recreation is combined to inspire and foster collaboration and new ideas. Another element is the meeting between young and more experienced scientists. Nearly half of the talks are given by young participants below 35 like myself. I was invited by the ATLAS collaboration to present our latest results on a search for a type of long-lived particles that has meant a lot to me for the last two years.

Blog | 03 Mar 2012

From 0-60 in 10 million seconds! – Part 2

This is continuing from the previous post, where I discussed how we convert data collected by ATLAS into usable objects. Here I explain the steps to get a Physics result. I can now use our data sample to prove/disprove the predictions of Supersymmetry (SUSY), string theory or what have you. What steps do I follow?

Blog | 19 Feb 2012

From 0-60 in 10 million seconds! – Part 1

OK, so I’ll try to give a flavour of how the data that we collect gets turned into a published result. As the title indicates, it takes a while! The post got very long, so I have split it in two parts. The first will talk about reconstructing data, and the second will explain the analysis stage.

Blog | 17 Feb 2012

7 or 8 TeV, a thousand terabyte question!

A very happy new year to the readers of this blog. As we start 2012, hoping to finally find the elusive Higgs boson and other signatures of new physics, an important question needs to be answered first - are we going to have collisions at a center of mass energy of 7 or 8 TeV?

Blog | 11 Feb 2012

Tweeting live #Higgs boson updates from #CERN

“If it’s just a fluctuation of background, it will take a lot of data to kill.” Dr. Fabiola Gianotti, spokesperson for the ATLAS collaboration, made this statement on Dec. 13, 2011 during a special seminar I attended at CERN. Within the minute that followed, I hurriedly concocted a tweet, tacked on #Higgs and #CERN hashtags, and sent Fabiola’s weighty comment out onto the WWW.

Blog | 11 Feb 2012

Higgs search papers submitted for publication

The results on Standard Model (SM) Higgs searches that ATLAS reported at a CERN seminar on December 13, 2011, have now been submitted for publication in three papers.

News | 07 Feb 2012

ATLAS discovers its first new particle

The ATLAS collaboration has announced the discovery of the χb(3P), which is a bound state of a bottom quark and bottom antiquark (bbar).

News | 22 Dec 2011

ATLAS experiment presents latest Higgs search status

The latest update of the ATLAS searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson was presented at a CERN seminar on December 13, 2011. As stated in the CERN press release, the new ATLAS and CMS results are "sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the elusive Higgs. Tantalising hints have been seen by both experiments in the same mass region, but these are not yet strong enough to claim a discovery."

Press Statement | 13 Dec 2011

The ATLAS and CMS combination of Higgs search results

The Higgs Boson is the only missing piece in the Standard Model of particle physics and its search is undoubtedly one of the most important searches in the history of physics. The Higgs boson is the generator of all elementary particle masses in nature. The mass of the Higgs boson itself is unknown, and before the LHC it was searched for in previous experiments but not found. LHC experiments have produced excellent results since the start of the data taking. In ATLAS and CMS a discussion was initiated about a year ago to combine the Higgs search results from both experiments. The framework and the procedure to combine results had to be defined and agreed upon before the combined analysis could proceed.

News | 01 Dec 2011

What if there is no Higgs boson?

Physicists are confident they will soon be able to answer a fundamental question at the LHC: how do particles acquire mass? The simplest answer, the one given in the Standard Model of the fundamental particles, is that a single particle, the Higgs boson, endows the other particles and itself with mass. The Higgs boson does this by means of the "Higgs mechanism", which involves breaking a symmetry that would leave all Standard Model particles massless if it were not broken. However the Higgs boson is not the only way the Higgs mechanism might work.

News | 30 Nov 2011

Joining forces in the search for the Higgs

Today we witnessed a landmark LHC first: At the HCP conference in Paris, friendly rivals, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, came together to present a joint result! This ATLAS-CMS combined Higgs search was motivated by the fact that pooling the dataset increases our chances of excluding or finding the Higgs boson over those of a single experiment. This is the first example of this kind of scientific collaboration at the LHC, and the success of the whole endeavor hinged on a whole host of thorny issues being tackled…

Blog | 25 Nov 2011

ATLAS and CMS combine summer '11 search limits on the Standard Model Higgs

Perhaps the most anticipated result of the LHC involves the search for the Higgs boson, the only particle predicted by the Standard Model (SM) that has not yet been seen by experiments. The Higgs boson helps explain how elementary particles acquire mass. If the SM Higgs boson exists it will be produced at the LHC and swiftly decay into various known and well-studied particles, with the dominant decay products depending on the actual Higgs mass. ATLAS and CMS search for the SM Higgs boson using a range of decay products: two photons; two tau leptons; two b quarks; two W bosons; and two Z bosons. Analysing all these channels ensures that the search is sensitive to observing the Higgs irrespective of its mass.

News | 18 Nov 2011

Charming results that have got everybody thinking…

I’m writing from the annual Hadron Collider Physics Symposium, which began on Monday in Paris, France. It’s organised jointly by LPNHE and the University of Paris VI & VII, with an excellent location right in the heart of the Latin Quarter. HCP is a fun conference with only plenary talks, which means that I’ve had the chance to attend talks on a wide range of subjects including many quite remote from my usual areas of expertise.

Blog | 18 Nov 2011

The power of perception

If you ask a child to draw a physicist, they’ll usually draw you a disheveled man in a lab coat. But looking around the hundreds of physicists eating lunch at CERN today, I saw many women, only one or two that could be classified as disheveled, and zero lab coats. Yet this image persists.

Blog | 16 Nov 2011

ATLAS reveals latest results at HCP11

The ATLAS Experiment presented its latest results at the Hadron Collider Physics Symposium 2011 in Paris, France (14-18 November). Many of the most recent searches and analyses are based on more than double the data available at the last big conference in August.

News | 16 Nov 2011

ATLAS in Paris for a pop-up launch

It’s not every day you get to explain ATLAS to a group of journalists with just a pop-up book as a prop. But, as some readers might already know, this is no ordinary pop-up book. ATLAS and the LHC leap from the page in incredible detail thanks to paper engineer Anton Radevsky’s wonderful designs. A new edition of the book has just been released in French, so at the end of last month I found myself travelling in to the centre of Paris from Orsay for the press launch.

Blog | 15 Nov 2011

ATLAS au pays du Soleil levant pour HCP 2012

Du 12 au 16 novembre, plus de 250 physiciens des particules se réuniront à Kyoto, au Japon, pour partager leurs plus récents résultats. L'une des conférences internationales de physique des particules les plus prisées de l'année, le Hadron Collider Physics Symposium 2012 (HCP 2012), aura lieu, cette année, au pays du Soleil levant.

News | 09 Nov 2011

The longest shift

The clock just turned 2:00 a.m., again, on LHC Page One – the machine’s online status viewer – and I’m pondering just how I ended up on the longest shift of the year. I normally love this evening, snuggling under a warm comforter for that extra hour of late-autumn sleep. But, this year, on the very hour we ‘fall back’, I am cuddling with the controls of ATLAS’s 46 meter long muon spectrometer, a bar of chocolate and an extra cup of coffee. So be it.

Blog | 01 Nov 2011

ATLAS reaches milestone: 5 inverse femtobarns of data!

In an amazing year that has exceeded our expectations, the Large Hadron Collider has delivered, and ATLAS has recorded, over 5 inverse femtobarns (fb-1) of collisions. These units correspond to having 3.4 x 1014 or 340 000 000 000 000 total collisions. Most analyses presented at the last major conference (the Lepton Photon Symposium in August in Mumbai) made use of about 1 fb-1, so this is a big jump.

News | 28 Oct 2011

Le Pop-Up d'ATLAS à Paris!

L'édition francophone de Voyage au Cœur de la Matière sortira le 25 octobre à Paris aux Editions Verlhac (diffusion Seuil). Ce livre animé dévoile une grande aventure scientifique moderne : l'extraordinaire quête menée par l'expérience ATLAS pour comprendre notre Univers.

News | 18 Oct 2011

ATLAS goes Pop in Paris!

A new French edition of the ATLAS pop-up book, Voyage au Cœur de la Matière (Voyage to the Heart of Matter), will be officially launched from the exhibition Entrée en Matière at Paris' Trocadéro on Tuesday, October 25th.

News | 18 Oct 2011

Dispatch from the dispatch: Musings from the Tevatron’s final run

The first time I drove to Fermilab as a grad student, I got kind of lost. However, once I remembered my adviser’s words of advice, it was suddenly easy to find the strangely shaped Wilson Hall, a.k.a. “the highrise sticking out of the Prairies”. During my PhD years with the CDF Collaboration, I went there many a time – to attend meetings, to take shifts. The Chicago area summers were harsh, and so were the winters. On early morning shifts over the Christmas week, I realized that all too well. CDF had over five hundred collaborators at that time and this was my first introduction to a big experiment. Despite its size, everyone still seemed to know each other and it was one big happy family.

Blog | 12 Oct 2011

Spreading the idea of day-to-day life in extreme science

Blog | 10 Oct 2011

The Tevatron: Goodnight but not goodbye

The Tevatron collider, the scientific predecessor of the LHC, was shut down last Friday after 26 years of operations. Situated at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) outside of Chicago, Illinois, the Tevatron collided protons with antiprotons at a center-of-mass energy just shy of 2 TeV. While it still held the title of the world’s highest energy colliding beams, it was the intellectual home of hundreds of scientists and students working as part of the CDF and D0 collaborations.

Blog | 04 Oct 2011

“La Nuit des Chercheurs” (Researchers’ Night)

Evening, Friday September 23rd. I came from Saclay (near Paris) to participate in the ‘Researchers’ Night’ event taking place across CERN as part of the European Researchers’ Night initiative. Students aged 13 to 18 were on their way from all around the local area to learn about what on earth it is we do at the mysterious “Point 1” – ATLAS’ home on the LHC ring. Three different groups of 10 or so students were to stay with the ATLAS team in the experiment’s control room from 6:00 p.m. until midnight, helping shifters to take data and monitor the experiment…

Blog | 29 Sep 2011

Moonlighting as a Physicist

There was a lively buzz about the ATLAS Control Room last Friday night, September 23rd, as local high school students descended to get a closer look at just exactly what goes on at the front line of particle physics.

News | 24 Sep 2011

ATLAS never sleeps

Working in an international laboratory like CERN is incredibly exciting, and I’m not just talking about Higgs hunting. People in the outside world are endlessly curious about what happens on the sprawling two-kilometre-long site, and I get asked all kinds of questions, ranging from the funny to the profound.

Blog | 22 Sep 2011

Re-hashing reconstruction

Now that the big summer conferences are under our belts, we’re busy reprocessing the data ATLAS has taken so far in 2011. The raw data we collect at ATLAS – basically millions of electrical signal values from the different bits of the detector – has to be treated (‘reconstructed’) to turn it into meaningful physics data that can be analyzed for signs of new physics.

Blog | 11 Sep 2011

Ars Atlastronica

So I’m back from the Ars Electronica 2011 festival in Linz, Austria. This year the guest of honor was CERN, to kickstart a cultural partnership which will endure over the next three years. The event was amazing, and the organization spotless. As Claudia mentioned in a previous post, CERN was well represented visually at the festival, mainly via a strong display of ATLAS multimedia throughout the many exhibit halls and events.

Blog | 07 Sep 2011

Science and art collide at Ars Electronica

Located in Linz, Austria, Ars Electronica is an exhibition centre and creative lab which “has been investigating the consequences of the Digital Revolution” since the late 1970’s. Ars Electronica holds a yearly festival that attracts thousands of people from Austria, Germany and the rest of the world. This year, the theme of the festival, which is happening in collaboration with CERN, is ‘Origin – how it all begins’.

Blog | 04 Sep 2011

Philosophising physics

Last Monday (August 22), within a tight 35-minute allocation, ATLAS’ Henri Bachacou presented the entirety of the results from ‘Beyond the Standard Model’ searches for BOTH the ATLAS and CMS experiments, to the Lepton Photon conference in Mumbai, India. This included results of studies on Supersymmetry, strong gravity, heavy resonances and long-lived particles, and was a staggering amount of information to convey in an extremely limited amount of time. Henri did a great job, firing through slides, and guiding the audience through the most up-to-date results from the wide range of exotic topics. He did have one thing on his side, however… from each search, from each physics topic and from each experiment, the results came back the same: Has the LHC seen anything beyond the standard model yet? Nope.

Blog | 03 Sep 2011

Higgs results from Lepton Photon

The Lepton Photon 2011 conference began on Monday in Mumbai, India. Over 400 physicists from all over the world (including me!) gathered to hear the latest results. One result in particular -- news on the search for the Higgs boson -- was foremost in people's minds, and rather than prolong the suspense further, the talks on the Higgs were scheduled right after the welcoming speeches.

Blog | 26 Aug 2011

ATLAS advances in the search for the Higgs and New Physics

The ATLAS experiment has continued to record data and to refine the analyses in the search for the Higgs boson and many other exciting signatures of new physics. The latest results are being presented at the Lepton Photon 2011 symposium in Mumbai, India, 22-27 August 2011. Since the previous meeting (the European Physical Society — EPS, Grenoble, France, 21-27 July 2011), the LHC has almost doubled the data provided to ATLAS.

News | 22 Aug 2011

ATLAS at Lepton-Photon 2011, Mumbai

The ATLAS Collaboration is pleased to be presenting its latest results at the Lepton Photon 2011 conference in Mumbai 22-27 August 2011.

Press Statement | 22 Aug 2011

Top down: Reflections on a long and sleepless analysis journey

For the last months (which feel like years…) I’ve been working, within a small group of people, on the precision measurement of the top quark pair production cross section, and if you think that sounds complicated – the German word is “Top-Quark-Paarproduktionswechselwirkungsquerschnitt”.

Blog | 21 Aug 2011

Frantic for femtobarns...

In particle physics, we describe the number of interesting particle collisions that we have in our data in terms of the "integrated luminosity", which is measured in units called inverse femtobarns. In the whole of 2010, the LHC delivered about 0.04 inverse femtobarns (about 3 million million collisions). Nowadays, it can deliver twice that in a single day!

Blog | 19 Aug 2011

ATLAS Presents New Results at Lepton Photon 2011

The ATLAS Collaboration is pleased to be presenting its latest results at the Lepton Photon 2011 conference in Mumbai 22-27 August 2011.

News | 18 Aug 2011

A look back at the EPS

I happened to run into Andrey Korytov after his eagerly awaited CMS Higgs talk. No, CMS had not yet seen the Higgs, and ATLAS could breathe a sigh of relief.

Blog | 30 Jul 2011

A view inside the ATLAS Higgs combination

Well it's been a few days since the Higgs presentations at EPS, and I'm just recovering from the lack of sleep. It's ironic that I have a newborn daughter, and my sleep deprivation is due to work.

Blog | 28 Jul 2011

Arrival at EPS

When I was invited to give a talk on behalf of ATLAS at this summer’s European Physical Society High Energy Physics conference (EPS), I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Most conferences I have been to are relatively intimate affairs where you have long discussions after every talk and then everybody trots down to the pub together to discuss the day’s results. EPS, though, is one of the largest particle physics conferences in the world. Or at least I reckon it is, having eyeballed the number of participants registered on the website, hailing from all sorts of fields ranging from astrophysics to ultra relativistic ions to our very own LHC proton-proton collider physics.

Blog | 28 Jul 2011

ATLAS results revealed at EPS HEP 2011 conference in Grenoble

Many members of the ATLAS Experiment Collaboration have been at the European Physical Society's HEP 2011 conference in Grenoble, France, this week, revealing the results of 35 new and exciting physics analyses for the very first time.

News | 27 Jul 2011

A Search for New Physics Processes using Dijet Events

The ATLAS Experiment has extended the energy frontier of searches for new particles and new processes beyond those of the Standard Model by studying collision events with so-called "dijets".

News | 21 Jun 2011

Is Nature Supersymmetric?

String Theory predicts a new symmetry, called "supersymmetry", that could shed light on some of today's mysteries of fundamental particles and interactions. In supersymmetry, every particle-type should have a "shadow" particle called a super-partner that (in general) has a much higher mass. The ATLAS Experiment has analyzed the first year of its LHC data and searched for evidence of these super-partners of ordinary matter.

News | 24 May 2011

Pauline Gagnon

Pauline Gagnon

When exactly did her interest in science start, Pauline Gagnon cannot say. "I always wanted to know what matter was made of,” she explains. Inspired by Marie Curie, her first choice was chemistry. No wonder that nine-year-old Pauline's dearest wish for Christmas was a chemistry kit. Unfortunately it said "Recommended for ages 10 and older" on the box. So her parents opted for a microscope instead and she had to wait another year to start chemistry experiments. "The best experiment was the one producing rotten egg smell - the whole family could tell it had been successful,” she recalls. She kept the mortar and pestle from that chemistry kit and uses it today to ground spices.

Profile | 23 Feb 2011

Teresa Fonseca Martin

Teresa Fonseca Martin

Has cooking something to do with physics? Sure! There is a difference, if the meal is cooked in a clay pot or in a metal pot. In a clay pot it will take longer to heat the food up, but then the temperature will stay for a long time, even thought the oven is turned off. On the contrary the metal pot will heat up much faster, but as soon the pot is removed from the oven, the heat is nearly gone.

Profile | 25 Jan 2011

Martin Rybar

Martin Rybar

There is usually a defining moment, or event, that leads a person to science. For 10 year old Martin Rybar, it was the moment when he found the chemistry laboratory kit from his uncle in his parents' house. Curiosity has always been the main driving force in science – and Martin was no exception.

Profile | 15 Dec 2010

Genevieve Steele

Genevieve Steele

Eight-year-old Genevieve Steele was a little girl who knew what she wanted. And what she wanted was to play the harp. As soon as she first spotted one, while clog dancing at Sidmouth Folk Festival on England's south coast, she pretty much didn't let it out of her sight.

Profile | 30 Nov 2010

Regina Kwee

Regina Kwee

Year 2000, which was declared as the “year of physics” in Germany, was the very year, when Regina Kwee finished high school with the German Abitur in Berlin. She and a friend visited the particle physics exhibition “Trip to the Big Bang” and this may well have triggered her interest for this field. She was very much interested in physics, although she had an humanistic education with focus on ancient Greek and Latin.

Profile | 15 Nov 2010

Alchemy

Beneath our feet on this warm November night, we have realized the ancient dream of turning lead into gold.

Blog | 07 Nov 2010

Takanori Kono

Takanori Kono

There are many paths into science and one that might have played a key role for Takanori Kono could be LEGO bricks. Maybe it is the segmented approach learned from playing with those bricks that helped him later on tackle computer programming. It is easier to break down any problem into smaller chunks, seeing how it is put together as though it were made from basic building blocks.

Profile | 01 Nov 2010

Valeria Perez Reale

Valeria Perez Reale

Physicists are elderly men, wearing white lab coats and looking a bit like Einstein - that was the way most kids draw physicists before their visit to CERN. But, thanks to Valeria Perez Reale and her colleagues who participated in the 'Draw me a physicist' program, the way these kids see scientists changed forever. “I was happy to be interviewed and sketched by 8 years old from the Geneva and Pays de Gex area, who had never visited CERN before,” Valeria says. She adds, “It fills me with satisfaction to see young children interested in science and the pleasure when they learn new things that change the way they see their universe around them.”

Profile | 19 Oct 2010

Frederick Luehring

Frederick Luehring

“That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” we all remember Neil Armstrong saying while taking his first steps on the moon. As so many, Fred Luehring was glued to the television set that 21st of June, 1969, but to him this event meant much more than to most.

Profile | 04 Oct 2010

Kathy Copic

Kathy Copic

Maybe it snuck into her subconscious while she was wandering the geometrically perfect street plan of her native Euclid (yes, named after the famous 'Father of Geometry') near Cleveland, Ohio. Maybe it rubbed off on her as she discovered the intricacies of risk and probability while dealing smoky late night blackjack for her father's casino equipment hire business. Or maybe it was just pure chance. But one way or another, mathematics is in Kathy Copic's bones.

Profile | 22 Sep 2010

Elvar Karl Bjarkason

Elvar Karl Bjarkason

“I've always been interested in science, and questions about the universe and what makes it tick.” says Elvar Bjarkason. Like many physicists he began by being interested in general science, so still in primary school he liked mathematics, chemistry and physics, while learning about the structure of atoms. But that was just a start.

Profile | 07 Sep 2010

The inverse picobarn threshold has been crossed in ATLAS!

Another milestone has been passed in the long run of ATLAS toward new physics. On Monday August 9, 2010 ATLAS has recorded the first inverse picobarn (pb-1) of 7 TeV collisions. The trend is good and we recently reached the 0.1 pb-1 per day of integrated luminosity (meaning that we can now collect in ~10 days the amount of data we have collected over the last 4 months).

Blog | 10 Aug 2010

Bengt Lund-Jensen

Bengt Lund-Jensen

“In Sweden you can go out dancing in the summertime, where they play popular music but adapted for dancing,” says Stockholm native Bengt Lund-Jensen. Nine years ago, he decided to re-visit the dances of his undergrad days in pursuit of fitness, and now he spends his summers stepping out with other Scandinavians in the midnight twilight.

Profile | 27 Jul 2010

ATLAS starting to get on Top of things

ATLAS is about to check one more particle off of its Standard Model (SM) checklist. Namely the top quark. This famous quark is perhaps one of the most complex of the SM particles.

Blog | 26 Jul 2010

Pascal Pralavorio

Pascal Pralavorio

“In a sense, life is never as you've foreseen it to be. This is also true for natural laws, and that's why I like to be a physicist so much,” Pascal Pralavorio says as he explains what makes discovery so interesting for him.

Profile | 13 Jul 2010

Trevor Vickey

Trevor Vickey

Going into his new position with Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand ('Wits' for short), Trevor Vickey sees his brief as “a sort of linear combination between a professorship and a Peace Corps assignment”. The tenure-track Senior Lecturer post will take him to a brand new continent, but, he says, he made the original application “on a whim” after five years as an ATLAS postdoc.

Profile | 14 Jun 2010

Sleepless Nights Lead to First Results of 2010...

Do you hear that? The incessant typing? The coffee machines vending cup after cup? If you go to Building 40, or Building 32, Building 188, or to any one of the many graduate student offices around the world, you will hear the tap of key boards, the whir of disk drives, and even the occasional heated civil discussions with "elevated" voices.

Blog | 06 Jun 2010

Mahsana Ahsan

Mahsana Ahsan

For most particle physicists, memories of the dim and distant past when they couldn't yet use a computer are distinctly fuzzy. For Mahsana Ahsan, though, they're a little fresher: “I didn't have a chance to use computers during my studies due to lack of computer labs,” she explains. “When I first went to the US, I was only able to type an email very slowly.”

Profile | 31 May 2010

Conversations on Shift

When the detector is running smoothly, neighbors in the ATLAS control room sometimes get conversational. A few days back I was on shift, quietly looking at plots on the monitor in front of me, trying to decide if one small sensor was misbehaving or not. “I have a question,” the shifter next to me said.

Blog | 26 May 2010

A new record run

In the evening of Saturday May 15, we have reached a new peak luminosity record of 6 1028 cm-2s-1

Blog | 16 May 2010

Lucie de Nooij

Lucie de Nooij

“I‘m very outgoing,”says Lucie de Nooij, without hesitation.“That may be a Dutch thing, but it‘s also very much me.”

Profile | 12 May 2010

Nitesh Soni

Nitesh Soni

Although he was a self-professed ‘bookworm’ up until his PhD days at Panjab University, Nitesh Soni somehow never expected to become a research scientist. “I was actually preparing for the Indian Administrative Services exam,” he recalls, an essential step on the path to becoming a Police Commissioner or Deputy Commissioner. “So I just joined particle physics research for a second option. But then after four months, my supervisor sent me to Japan, which changed my life.”

Profile | 27 Apr 2010

Putting the Squeeze on the Protons

It took a little bit of time, but the wait was worth it. The LHC has successfully achieved its first physics run with "squeezed beams"!

Blog | 26 Apr 2010

One in a few million

ATLAS has been designed to detect rare events in high energy proton-proton collisions. ATLAS ultimate goal is to measure events as rare as one in several thousand billions, but we are modest (for the time being) waiting for the luminosity to rise.

Blog | 24 Apr 2010

Rachid Mazini

Rachid Mazini

Rachid Mazini grew up in Casablanca, Morocco. Although he’s now a big fan of rugged terrain, he spent his youth as a “city boy” with holidays on the Atlantic shoreline. It wasn’t until he started university in Marrakech that he began to explore the mountains – the Atlas range, in fact.

Profile | 13 Apr 2010

Its All About The Lumi!

Now that the LHC has established colliding stable beams at a center of mass energy of 7 TeV, the next step to maximize its physics reach is to provide the most luminosity possible. As Leo posted, we need to increase the number of proton - proton collisions to make sure we have a chance of seeing the physics that we are looking for. The reason for that is because different p.hysics processes have different probabilities. These probabilities are referred to as cross-sections (in a vague reference to the particle's size). If one multiplies a cross section by a luminosity than what you get is a number of events.

Blog | 06 Apr 2010

Life Imitating Reality

I was home sick today, probably from the stress of getting ready for "M-Day" (aka Media Day), more likely though I finally succumbed to the cold that had been spreading through the Control Room. As it so happened, my laptop had been in the shop because it experience an "incident" (actually I just dropped it) last Monday (the week before Media Day), and I just picked it up yesterday.

Blog | 02 Apr 2010

Increasing collision rate

Many collisions will be needed to unveil the secrets eventually hidden at the 7 TeV energy regime.

Blog | 01 Apr 2010

Let The Physics Begin!

After decades of planning. After years of delays and immeasureable amounts of patience and hard work. The physics operations of the LHC has begun!

Blog | 30 Mar 2010

First 7 Tev collisions have been recorded in ATLAS

After ramping of the beams to 3.5 TeV and tuning, final checks, and some emotions due to an unforeseen beam dump, the 7 TeV collisions finally appeared on the on-line monitors of the ATLAS Control Room.

Blog | 30 Mar 2010

Expecting beam in 30 minutes!

During this morning LHC has been working to give us the beam conditions for collisions.

Blog | 30 Mar 2010

Jean-Baptiste Blanchard

Jean-Baptiste Blanchard

If you call Jean-Baptiste Blanchard by his full first name, try it the French way and drop the ‘p’. But he generally goes by JB.

Profile | 29 Mar 2010

How will it happen?

So how will this whole "First 7 TeV Collisions" event happen? Well, here is my (somewhat naive) understanding of what will happen.

Blog | 28 Mar 2010

Approaching the End...and a New Beginning

This Tuesday, if all goes according to plan, will mark the end of a very long journey for many High Energy Physicists. The first 7 TeV Collisions will signal the end of the the commissioning period of the LHC and its experiments.

Blog | 28 Mar 2010

Big step forward in LHC operation last night

Last night a new very important milestone has been reached by the LHC: two counter-circulating proton beams have been accelerated for the first time to 3.5 TeV, the energy that they should routinely reach in the 2010-2011 running period.

Blog | 19 Mar 2010

ATLAS Experiment Reports Its First Physics Results from the LHC

The first physics results from the ATLAS Experiment with proton-proton collisions at an energy of 0.9 TeV in late 2009 have now been accepted for publication in the journal Physics Letters B.

News | 17 Mar 2010

3 Firsts for ATLAS in 2010

It has been a BUSY weekend! The LHC has been working around the clock get the machine commissioned, and ATLAS has been enjoying the many Firsts that have resulted.

Blog | 15 Mar 2010

ATLAS celebrating the International Women's day!

Today ATLAS celebrates the role of women in physics its own way. ATLAS has encouraged its staff and users to place as many women as possible on shift in the control room and to serve as guides for official visits.

Blog | 08 Mar 2010

Jim Degenhardt

Jim Degenhardt

As he munches on an all-American breakfast – fresh juice and a bagel hand-delivered by a friend from New York – Jim Degenhardt is the first to admit he’s not a morning person. It’s the aftermath of the 9 a.m. Run Meeting, a daily appointment for Jim as co-run coordinator of the TRT, but the NY-themed sustenance seems to be doing the trick.

Profile | 08 Mar 2010

A titan awakes

At approximately 2:40 am Central European Time, ATLAS saw particles from the LHC for the first time in 2010. As in previous LHC turn-on periods the first thing we see are beam splashes from the LHC beams as they slowly thread the beam through the LHC ring for the first time.

Blog | 01 Mar 2010

The calm before the storm

The Control Room is quiet. The configurations are set. The trigger menu is uploaded. The shifters are ready. All that is left is for the LHC to deliver beam.

Blog | 27 Feb 2010

Gearing-up for the 2010 run!

ATLAS has been taking cosmic rays data this month exercising new features of the data acquisition, including protocols to start and control the run.

Blog | 25 Feb 2010

Rolf Seuster

Rolf Seuster

For Rolf Seuster, there’s no place like Victoria, Canada. Located on Vancouver Island, about 90 km south of this year’s Winter Olympics, Rolf believes it’s one of the nicest places in the country. “It’s the size of Switzerland, and there’s maybe half a million people on the whole island,” he says.

Profile | 22 Feb 2010

Germán Carrillo

Germán Carrillo

It’s hardly a stretch of the imagination to think of ATLAS and CMS as siblings: competing, trying to get ahead, but ultimately friendly and supportive of each other. But for Germán Carrillo, the analogy moves over into the literal, because while he studies for a PhD on ATLAS, older brother Camillo is a six-year CMS devotee.

Profile | 09 Feb 2010

First Integrated Run in 2010

Today ATLAS has started the integrated runs. This has happened before, nevertheless this is the first time ATLAS subdetectors get together after the winter break, a lot of work has been done since then.

Blog | 02 Feb 2010

François Butin

François Butin

When the time came for François Butin to do his military service for France, he wasn’t interested in the armed forces. Instead, he chose to become a “cooperant”, working for a longer period in research or engineering. “In the old days, if you wanted to do your military service in an intelligent way, that was one of the good opportunities,” says François.

Profile | 25 Jan 2010

Attila Krasznahorkay

Attila Krasznahorkay

Attila Krasznahorkay has physics in his blood, the son of a nuclear physicist and a physics and math teacher. He was also introduced to the traveling life style at an early age, moving from his Hungarian homeland to Groningen in the Netherlands at eight years old when his father began work in the city’s university. His young, agile brain managed to pick up the Dutch language, but now, although he recalls the experience of being fluent at age nine, he struggles to think of words.

Profile | 13 Jan 2010

All Bunched Up!

High Energy Physicists have been waiting for many years to see the LHC turn on. Now that it has been turned on, the network of physicists around the world have quickly been harnessed. It can be considered a phase transition in particle physics.

Blog | 06 Jan 2010

Thorsten Wengler

Thorsten Wengler

Thorsten Wengler can still remember exactly where he was when the Berlin wall fell in November 1989: on night guard, sitting atop a pile of arms and ammunition in the woods outside of Potsdam, Germany, alongside three of his fellow East German soldiers.

Profile | 14 Dec 2009

More collisions at 2.36 TeV

This early morning Dec.14 at 2.40, after a 8 minutes ramp, the energy of the two LHC beams has been brought up to 1.18 TeV again.

News | 14 Dec 2009

Just a taste

At 21:32 pm on December 8th, the LHC did something that no other accelerator has ever done before.

Blog | 11 Dec 2009

ATLAS increases its active channel count by one order of magnitude

On Sunday December 6, 2009 at 8.00 the ATLAS Pixel Detector has measured, for the first time, tracks emerging from LHC collisions. It has been a very smooth start.

Blog | 11 Dec 2009

First collisions with the pixel detector

It's been a busy weekend for ATLAS. Last night, well, actually early this morning, we received the "stable beam" flag from the LHC.

Blog | 07 Dec 2009

Tapas Sarangi

Tapas Sarangi

If a chance meeting hadn’t led Tapas Sarangi to a PhD in Japan, things could have been very different: “I would probably have been in the Indian Navy as a commissioned officer!” he admits.

Profile | 30 Nov 2009

First collisions in ATLAS

A few days ago, loud cheers and happy faces filled the ATLAS Control Room while the whole detector lit up: protons are back at the experiment's door, and everybody forgot in a second the long year of waiting for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to resume operation.

News | 23 Nov 2009

LHC beams and events back in ATLAS

Loud cheers and happy faces fill the ATLAS Control Room while the whole detector lights up: protons are back today at the experiment's door, and everybody forgets in a second the long year of waiting for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to resume operation.

News | 21 Nov 2009

Yongsheng Gao

Yongsheng Gao

Yongsheng Gao was born in Jinan, the capital of the Shandong province of China, also the home of Confucius some 2500 years ago. The Yellow River flows by Jinan, the ‘City of the Springs’, with the Mountain Tai nearby.

Profile | 16 Nov 2009

ATLAS Preparing for Collisions in Late-2009

The most recent schedule envisions beam reaching ATLAS in late November with low-energy collisions shortly thereafter.

News | 15 Nov 2009

Hans Peter Beck

Hans Peter Beck

Unlike most of us at CERN, Hans Peter Beck is a Swiss native. He grew up in places like Weggis, on the shore of Lake Lucerne; Wolfenschiessen, in the mountainous interior of Switzerland; Dietikon, a suburb of Zürich, and finally in Zürich itself. He completed his matura – the Swiss secondary education – at the Mathematical Natural Science Gymnasium, Rämibühl, Zürich. Although he received better marks in chemistry at the time, physics held a much stronger attraction because it delves into matter at its most basic.

Profile | 02 Nov 2009

Nabil Ghodbane

Nabil Ghodbane

Looking back, as he can now, from a position of maturity, Nabil Ghodbane is a little embarrassed about the scene that unfolded when he met Peter Higgs. “At the time, I was maybe a bit naïve,” he admits bashfully, as he recounts a tale of waiting outside the toilets after a Scottish summer school talk to greet Professor Higgs on his way out. “We were like groupies!” he laughs at himself and other students who stampeded the reluctant physics celebrity.

Profile | 20 Oct 2009

Sandra Horvat

Sandra Horvat

“The first time I came to Munich, I fell in love with the city,” says Sandra Horvat. She was born in Zagreb, Croatia, and her parents and brother still live 20 kilometres from the city, in Samobor. “It's a lovely and cosy place, one of the oldest and favourite recreation places for many Croats. I like it a lot!”

Profile | 05 Oct 2009

Richard Teuscher

Richard Teuscher

As an ATLAS physicist, it’s not often you get to stand back and look at the bigger picture, according to Richard Teuscher: “Not at all! It’s only really when you get a chance to talk to someone about what you’re doing. Day-to-day, you’re writing software or fixing some part of the detector. But at the end you think, ‘Wow, look what we’ve done!’"

Profile | 22 Sep 2009

Lidia Smirnova

Lidia Smirnova

Moscow has been home to Lidia Smirnova for as long as she can remember. She was born in Ukraine, her mother’s region, shortly after the end of World War II. Her father, from Siberia, had served five years in the thick of the fighting, on the Soviet side. “He was wounded twice, but was really lucky to be saved with his life,” says Lidia. He was also very lucky to be stopped in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, on his way from Germany to Japan. In that summer, 1945, he met Lidia’s mother.

Profile | 07 Sep 2009

Claudia Marcelloni

Claudia Marcelloni

Most people at CERN know Claudia Marcelloni as the ATLAS photographer and the exquisite eye behind the ATLAS book, Exploring the Mystery of Matter. But to Claudia, photography is just one tool that she could use to practice her passion: the creative communication of ideas.

Profile | 27 Jul 2009

George Mikenberg

George Mikenberg

Born Jorge in Argentina, George Mikenberg is a man of many aliases. He changed his name to the Hebrew Giora when he settled in Israel, but in English-speaking company, he encountered a problem: “The Anglo-Saxons cannot pronounce it, or rather they pronounce it in a way that means WC in Arabic.” And so he became George, but also Georg for the German-speaking, and Georges for his French-Swiss wife.

Profile | 13 Jul 2009

Jochen Schieck

Jochen Schieck

For Jochen Schieck, monthly trips to CERN – often spanning just one day – suit him well. The rest of the time he’s based at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) of Physics in Munich.

Profile | 16 Jun 2009

Adele Rimoldi

Adele Rimoldi

Particle physics is an endurance sport. The building of ATLAS took nearly two decades of design and construction. In the early autumn, the blast from the first colliding particles will mark the start of a multi-year race to discover new physics. This rhythm of preparation and performance is one that Adele Rimoldi knows well.

Profile | 02 Jun 2009

Osamu Jinnouchi

Osamu Jinnouchi

Osamu Jinnouchi had never left his native Japan when he first came to CERN, as a summer student with KEK, aged 25. “I don’t quite remember, but it was all impressive,” he ponders. “Everything was different here.”

Profile | 18 May 2009

Multimedia contest launched

A new multimedia contest has been set up to put talented young filmmakers and science communicators in touch with ATLAS.

News | 04 May 2009

Marco Aurelio Diaz

Marco Aurelio Diaz

Mountains are an enduring presence in the life of Marco Aurelio Díaz. “Wherever you are in Chile, the Andes are there, and they make an imprint in your mind that time does not erase,” he explains.

Profile | 04 May 2009

Helenka Przysiezniak Frey

Helenka Przysiezniak Frey

Harry Potter fans can probably sympathise with Helenka Przysiezniak Frey’s initial reaction to being profiled for e-News. “My husband tells me: do it,” she wrote in an email, but her latest reading material had left her with some reservations: “[The Harry Potter] equivalent of ATLAS e-News, the Daily Prophet, says all kinds of lies about Harry and co.”

Profile | 23 Apr 2009

Borut Kersevan

Borut Kersevan

How does Borut Kersevan spend his free time? “What free time? is the answer,” he says with a wry grin. But what little he has, he likes to spend on family, travel, and good conversation.

Profile | 06 Apr 2009

Higgs finds the Higgs at RAL

On Friday, March 13th, British high school student Jonathan Higgs discovered the elusive Higgs boson among the simulated particle tracks in Minerva – a special form of ATLAS' event display program, Atlantis, designed for students in the International Particle Physics Masterclasses.

News | 01 Apr 2009

Laura González Silva

Laura González Silva

Salsa, singing, sight-seeing and skiing are all high on the list of ways to relax and unwind for up-beat PhD student Laura González Silva. “Dancing, I loved it always. I try to go as often as I can,” she smiles. Back in her hometown of Buenos Aires, Laura was part of a choir too, but in Geneva her vocal talents are mainly consigned to karaoke bars or her shower. “Singing and dancing – they’re a part of me,” she grins. “I forget about everything. And it’s good after spending ten-hours-a-day in front of the computer!”

Profile | 24 Mar 2009

A comic takes on CERN

If you want insight into the lives of graduate students, look no further than Jorge Cham’s Piled Higher and Deeper comic series, detailing the trials and tribulations of earning a PhD. He brought his well-honed observational humour to CERN, meeting with a few graduate students and post-docs for a slice of life at the world’s largest physics experiment.

News | 24 Mar 2009

A Wall ATLAS

Twenty-eight-year-old Josef Kristofoletti is a traveling artist. On the site documenting the work of his group, transitantenna.com, he writes: "I am taking a survey of American mural painting in all of its forms, looking for the best pictures across the land, and painting some along the way." One of these paintings is an image of the ATLAS detector, a 13 x 7 metre mural on the side of the Redux Contemporary Art Center in South Carolina, entitled "Angel of the Higgs Boson".

News | 09 Mar 2009

Stanislav Němeček

Stanislav Němeček

In his more laid-back free time, Stanislav Němeček enjoys good detective novels and a production about a fictional Czech genius by the name of Jára Cimrman. The legends of Cimrman began in radio shows but later became plays in two parts: a lecture by a “professor” about recently uncovered work by this scientist/inventor/writer/philosopher and a scene played out by actors. The idea of Cimrman has been around since 1966, beginning as sort of a comic, literary protest to Communist rule. New episodes are performed every few years. Though a fictional genius, Cimrman is a symbol of Czech pride.

Profile | 09 Mar 2009

Andrea Dotti

Andrea Dotti

It was Santa Claus who first introduced TileCal data quality coordinator Andrea Dotti to “serious science”, when he was just 12 years old. “Since I was a small kid, I was more skilled in maths,” he explains. “I never liked to learn poems by heart, history was not my thing…” But the year Andrea received a chemistry set for Christmas he was immediately hooked, his interest fostered by a kind elderly pharmacist who sold him supplies.

Profile | 25 Feb 2009

Tinseltown pays us a visit

ATLAS got a little taste of Tinseltown on February 12th, as director Ron Howard, and actors Tom Hanks and Ayelet Zurer rolled into town to promote their new film – an adaption of Dan Brown’s bestseller Angels and Demons.

News | 25 Feb 2009

The ATLAS Secretariat

The ATLAS Secretariat

You may already know the head of the Secretariat, Connie Potter, but you may not be familiar with all of the women who help keep the ATLAS collaboration running smoothly. Sitting around a table with Petya Lilova (Bulgarian), Kate Richardson (British), Christine Demirdjian (French), and Claire Gibon (French), the team of the ATLAS Secretariat, the first question was: “What work in ATLAS falls to the Secretariat?”

Profile | 09 Feb 2009

Eric Eisenhandler

Eric Eisenhandler

Even after 40 years living between Britain and Geneva, New York is still audible in the voice of Eric Eisenhandler. He grew up in the Bronx – “the North Bronx” he quickly corrects, lest we imagine the violence and urban decay that South Bronx came to symbolize.

Profile | 26 Jan 2009

The wanderer returns

Over Christmas, we followed the progress of ATLAS collaborator, Katharine Leney, as she and her boyfriend Pierre drove across Europe and Africa in a beaten up second hand car, to raise money for development charities working in Africa.

News | 12 Jan 2009

Anna and Lucia di Ciaccio

Anna and Lucia di Ciaccio

Physics, as a discipline, isn’t short of references to symmetry and balance. The tale of Anna and Lucia Di Ciaccio though is almost poetic in the way it weaves. They are non-identical twins, and interviewing them is both slightly surreal and a complete delight.

Profile | 12 Jan 2009

ATLAS preparing for collisions in mid-2009

The full ATLAS Experiment has been operational and taking cosmic ray data since September 2008, and high-energy collisions are scheduled for late summer 2009. Data from cosmic rays that hit the ATLAS detector are valuable to calibrate and synchronize the many detector elements. Even more exciting were the so-called “splash events” that occurred as the LHC was being tuned up starting 10 September 2008.

News | 15 Dec 2008

Anna Kaczmarska

Anna Kaczmarska

Anna Kaczmarska is an artistic Polish physicist working as a software developer of the official ATLAS software package designed to detect tau leptons. Since Anna was a teenager, she has loved medieval arts: literature, architecture and music, whose rhythms, she says, help her to program ATLAS software.

Profile | 15 Dec 2008

Jonas Strandberg

Jonas Strandberg

“I think the money put in the summer school is among the best ways that CERN has to invest money!” says Jonas Strandberg, a Swedish physicist working on the Muon Spectrometer and Higgs Physics at ATLAS. He is another good example of the power of the CERN Summer School in drawing outstanding students into particle physics; since Jonas first came to CERN in the summer of 1998 as a physics undergraduate student, he always wanted to return.

Profile | 08 Dec 2008

Chris Oram

Chris Oram

“I’ve always been an outdoors person,” says Chris Oram, echoing the sentiments of many an Alp- and Jura-hiking CERN physicist. It may come as a surprise that he spent years of study in central London, starting out at Bedford College, London University, which stood in one of the city’s largest parks. He studied physics there and proceeded to Queen Mary College of London for his PhD. However, he did his research in Vancouver, Canada.

Profile | 01 Dec 2008

Pippa Wells

Pippa Wells

For SCT Project Leader, Pippa Wells, thoughts of precision, timing, collaborative working, and getting things to work in harmony are familiar to her both in and out of work. Her passion is playing the violin – specifically in orchestras. “It’s always been playing music with other people that has motivated me,” says Pippa, who picked up her first instrument when she was just six years old.

Profile | 18 Nov 2008

Amelia Maio

Amelia Maio

If the ATLAS detector assembly could be compared to a marathon, then Amelia Maio would be best described as a long-distance runner! This Portuguese physicist and Associate Professor at Lisbon University has been involved in the design of the ATLAS detector since its very conception. In addition, since the late 1980s, Amelia has also been a very active ‘outreach’ physicist.

Profile | 10 Nov 2008

Zuzana Zajacova

Zuzana Zajacova

Zuzana Zajacova found her way to ATLAS through a slightly unusual route. Rather than being a particle physicist or engineer, she comes from a background of biomedical physics.

Profile | 03 Nov 2008

Seda Persembe

Seda Persembe

Last summer, Seda Persembe joined the CERN Summer Students after receiving the Engin Arik fellowship, which was set up last December in memory of Turkish professor Engin Arik. After this unique experience, this fresh Physics graduate from Ankara University is now back at CERN as a research student working with Metin Arik, Engin’s husband.

Profile | 28 Oct 2008

Andi Salzburger

Andi Salzburger

When ATLAS physicist Andi Salzburger finished his PhD in May 2008, he thought of doing something really special to celebrate such a milestone in his life. He ended up walking 430Km, traveling the whole length of Iceland from North to South on foot.

Profile | 20 Oct 2008

Steve Lloyd

Steve Lloyd

Talking to Steve Lloyd, you can’t help but get the sense that the influence of this softly spoken, polite Brit is woven into the very fabric of CERN. As the author of the improved ATLAS Computing Workbook, he has certainly touched the working lives of all new members of ATLAS since 2005, but his reach extends further than that.

Profile | 13 Oct 2008

Alex Harvey

Alex Harvey

Alex Harvey’s path to particle physics is rather uncommon. He is now a PhD student at Hampton University working in the ATLAS Transition Radiation Tracker (TRT) group. But when Alex was only twenty years old, he had to put on hold getting a physics degree to make a living and that happened to be working in a casino. It was only after seventeen years of a successful career in several gambling houses that Alex went back to his true vocation.

Profile | 06 Oct 2008

Soshi Tsuno

Soshi Tsuno

Soshi Tsuno didn’t know much about particle physics until he met professor Hiroshi Takeda in his fourth year at Kobe University in 1996. At the time, ATLAS collaborators there were already developing the thin gap muon chambers (TGCs) that reside in both the large and small wheels, and Soshi joined this work.

Profile | 29 Sep 2008

Anthony Morley

Anthony Morley

Walk through Restaurant 1 at about 1 p.m. on a weekday, and you can’t fail to notice the plethora of languages being spoken. Not only that, the diversity of accents twisting themselves around English or French conversations reveals just how many nationalities are represented at CERN. Nevertheless, listening to Anthony Morley mid-flow is still a bit of a novelty, given that he’s one of only a handful of Australians working on-site on ATLAS.

Profile | 22 Sep 2008

Thijs Cornelissen

Thijs Cornelissen

Thijs Cornelissen is a Dutch physicist in the ATLAS Data Processing (ADP) group, working on track reconstruction. In these busy days closer to the switch on of the detector, Thijs is writing code to make ready the ATLAS track software, but he also manages to find time to follow his other passion: flying.

Profile | 15 Sep 2008

First beam and first events in ATLAS

ATLAS experimenters celebrated today as the first beams circulated the Large Hadron Collider in both directions. While everyone was cheering in the LHC control room, the cheers were echoed in the ATLAS and other control rooms, and in several auditoriums around CERN.

News | 10 Sep 2008

Vato Kartvelishvili

Vato Kartvelishvili

Vato Kartvelishvili credits his presence at CERN to a man he never met. George Chikovani, the first Georgian to come to CERN, despite the Iron Curtain in the early 1960s, is an inspiration to him. “He started it all, certainly from Georgian side,” says Vato. Inventor of the streamer chamber, his legacy lives on in ATLAS itself as many subdetectors are advanced models based on his design.

Profile | 08 Sep 2008

Football and Modern Art for ATLAS

This time the outside ATLAS overview week was held in a somewhat unusual venue for a physics meeting. All the plenary sessions were organized inside the VIP area of the famous soccer stadium "Stade de Suisse" just outside the city center of Bern. I was one of the few participants of the meetings that had previously been in this stadium and moreover I was honored to be the coach of one of the two ATLAS soccer teams composed specially for the meeting. Thus when I was asked to give my impressions from the meeting, I thought I should mostly share my analysis and personal view of the first ATLAS soccer game and I happily accepted.

News | 08 Sep 2008

Raul Murillo

Raul Murillo

Good luck has winked at Raul Murillo all his life, and he has seized his opportunities. The story of this Catalan engineer working on the ATLAS TDAQ group is full of remarkable coincidences.

Profile | 28 Jul 2008

Marc Dobson

Marc Dobson

Marc Dobson plays something of a lynchpin role at ATLAS; he’s one of those utterly essential people whose true value you only discover when things are going wrong and all Hell is breaking loose.

Profile | 22 Jul 2008

Ferdinand Hahn

Ferdinand Hahn

Ferdinand Hahn may not be strictly ATLAS, but his work on gas systems is vital to all four experiments.

Profile | 14 Jul 2008

Raksapol Thananuwong

Raksapol Thananuwong

Raksapol is both reserved and very friendly – a common Thai characteristic. In September, it will be one year since he left his native Bangkok to join, as a research assistant, the Department of Physics at the University of Geneva. This is where he is doing performance studies of the electron triggers to optimize the physics discovery potential. With his hard work, he is hoping to turn this research into a PhD project in September.

Profile | 01 Jul 2008

Kate Shaw

Kate Shaw

“I’ve always wanted to do it I guess,” considers ATLAS PhD student Kate Shaw. “It was probably books by Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose… They inspired me to start with – to understand the fundamentals of the Universe.”

Profile | 23 Jun 2008

Srini Rajagopalan

Srini Rajagopalan

Forty million beam crossings, each containing about twenty collisions, must be processed and analysed each second with only two hundred of those selected and saved for further analysis. There are no second chances! That is the challenge of the ATLAS trigger system: forefront in the analysis of new discoveries at the LHC. Srini Rajagopalan, a physicist from Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in New York, has taken up this challenge and is one of the scientists responsible for making sure that the trigger selects events that are rich in physics.

Profile | 16 Jun 2008

Socio-Economic Perspectives on ATLAS

Building the ATLAS detector has been a mammoth and innovative project. Sociologists, economists, and entrepreneurs have studied how such projects benefit society and the economy. The ATLAS collaboration has a number of unique characteristics, because of the size of the project, together with its complex scientific nature. It is the largest collaborative effort ever attempted in the physical sciences with more than 2200 physicists from 38 countries.

News | 15 Jun 2008

From Exotic Particles to Possible Solutions for Blindness

The search for exotic particle has led Alan Litke and his ATLAS colleagues to design a system that has allowed the discovery of a new type of cell in the retina of primates, and this technology is helping to find solutions for certain types of blindness.

News | 10 Jun 2008

Troels Petersen

Troels Petersen

Like many ATLAS collaborators, Troels Petersen’s current project is not his first CERN experience. He came here a decade ago as a summer student on NA48 and NA59, working on kaons and polarised photon beams.

Profile | 09 Jun 2008

Sofia Chouridou

Sofia Chouridou

As the 2008 Summer Student Program is just about to start, here is an example of how the Program is successful at bringing talented physics students into the field of particle physics: “The CERN summer school changed my life,” says Sofia Chouridou, a Greek physicist working on the SCT at ATLAS. Since Sofia first came to CERN in 1995 while enrolled in Physics at the University of Thessaloniki, she always wanted to work in the biggest particle physics lab in the world.

Profile | 02 Jun 2008

Sergei Malyukov

Sergei Malyukov

“Of course, at the very beginning, I had no idea how complex it would be. I think most people didn't. I thought it might take two or three years, but not almost six,” says Sergei Malyukov of the ATLAS cabling project which will finally reach its completion at the end of June. As Cabling Project Coordinator, Sergei has certainly had his hands full, both metaphorically and physically.

Profile | 27 May 2008

Katherine McAlpine

Katherine McAlpine

I come from Michigan, the northern US state that looks like a mitten in the middle of the Great Lakes, and graduated from Michigan State University just last May (2007). I knew from the start that I wanted to write science and decided that professional writing and physics would be an excellent combination.

Profile | 13 May 2008

Yann Coadou

Yann Coadou

Yann Coadou may have begun his CERN fellowship just last year, but he is no stranger to the ATLAS project – it is the third time in his short career that he has worked on ATLAS.

Profile | 05 May 2008

German Chancellor Merkel visits ATLAS

German Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel made a historic visit to CERN at the end of last month. During her brief 1.5 hours on site, she was taken on a whistle-stop tour of the ATLAS control room and cavern, and given the chance to look down on the largest particle physics experiment in the world from a dizzying height of 100 metres through the access shaft which links the massive underground cavern to the surface.

News | 01 May 2008

Katarina Pajchel

Katarina Pajchel

Polish-born PhD student Katarina Pajchel moved to Norway when she was very young. She studied physics in Bergen and went on to complete a Master’s degree there too, analysing DELPHI data coming off LEP. Now part of the University of Oslo’s experimental HEP group, she has spent the last three years involved in developing Grid computing for ATLAS.

Profile | 21 Apr 2008

Argentina, Chile and Colombia Join ATLAS Experiment

The ATLAS collaboration is continuously expanding, and recently its message has reached new shores – South America. Three new countries, Argentina, Chile and Colombia joined the collaboration at the beginning of the year, when Peter Jenni, ATLAS spokesperson, signed collaboration agreements formalising the presence of the Latin American research teams within the ATLAS experiment.

News | 15 Apr 2008

Lucia Masetti and Christian Schmitt

Lucia Masetti and Christian Schmitt

CERN holds a special place in the hearts of Christian Schmitt and Lucia Masetti. Not only are they both working on the ATLAS project, but also the recently wedded couple first met each other on the summer student programme at CERN in 1999.

Profile | 14 Apr 2008

Great Interest as ATLAS and CERN Open to Public

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but how would recent attempts in a Hawaiian court to stop the opening of the LHC because of safety concerns affect the general public’s perception of CERN? The Open Day on 5-6 April gave the ATLAS Collaboration a chance to find out.

News | 07 Apr 2008

Kirill Egorov

Kirill Egorov

All members of the ATLAS collaboration have been working to a demanding schedule over the last few years as they prepare for the LHC turn-on, but few can claim to have been as busy as Kirill Egorov, affiliated with Indiana University. In the five years since he arrived at ATLAS from the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute in Russia, Kirill has worked on the TRT Barrel, cabling, the connection of the TRT end-cap, the gas and cooling system, and the SCT. His next task is helping with the cooling system for the pixel detector.

Profile | 07 Apr 2008

Atlas.ch Website Surpasses 1 Million Hits in 2007

The anticipation on site in Switzerland is tangible as the final steps in the construction of the ATLAS detector get underway, ahead of the LHC switch-on later this year. But whilst all the hard work is going on down in the pit, a small team of people are toiling equally hard to bring that sense of excitement and wonder out into the wider world, and throw open a window onto what will be the biggest experiment in the history of human kind.

News | 01 Apr 2008

Antonio Cárdenas

Antonio Cárdenas

When the Venezuelan Antonio Cárdenas discovered the program HELEN –the High Energy Physics Latin American European network – he did not doubt it a second and applied for it. For this physics student from the University of Los Andes in Venezuela, HELEN was a unique chance to come to Europe and get hands on particle physics, a field that he had only read about in books before.

Profile | 31 Mar 2008

Monica Dunford

Monica Dunford

Anyone working on the ATLAS experiment right now will agree that it is more than a full-time job. But Monica Dunford is not your average woman. On top of working on the Tile Calorimeter, helping to commission the Level-one Trigger, and coordinating Tile Cal’s operation running, she somehow finds the time and energy to row, ski, run marathons, and tell the world about life here at ATLAS.

Profile | 17 Mar 2008

Ned Spencer

Ned Spencer

Ned Spencer may be a key member of the ATLAS grounding and shielding team, but he came to physics at the relatively late age of 32. “All through my twenties I spent a lot of time at the San Francisco Zen Center,” he says. “Zen Buddhism is really a kind of yoga in which the main asana, or position, is sitting cross-legged.” That was something Ned had difficulties with. “I began to have trouble with the nerves in my legs so I couldn’t sit and meditate much. That limited what I felt I could do in the community.”

Profile | 10 Mar 2008

Kamal Benslama

Kamal Benslama

Kamal Benslama is a young professor of physics leading the ATLAS-Regina group, a recently formed and international high energy physics research team at the University of Regina in Canada. The group was set up in 2006, and all its members - Kamal, post docs, graduate and undergraduate students are devoting their efforts to the ATLAS detector. Their research operates on two fronts: the Liquid Argon calorimeter and the High Level Trigger.

Profile | 03 Mar 2008

ATLAS completes world's largest jigsaw puzzle

Celebrations are underway in the ATLAS Experiment, as the final element of the detector was lowered into the cavern on Friday February 29th, 2008. The second “small wheel” is also the final part of the muon subsystem, but the wheels themselves are small in name only. At 9.3 metres in diameter, and weighing in at 100 tons each, moving them from their construction warehouse, at the north-west tip of the CERN site in Geneva, to the underground ATLAS cavern was a challenge which was anything but small.

News | 29 Feb 2008

Tatiana Klioutchnikova

Tatiana Klioutchnikova

We’ve all heard the story about the End Cap Toroid magnets having only a few centimetres clearance on either side as they were eased into place in the detector last year. Well, Tatiana Klioutchnikova and her colleagues are the ones to thank for that carefully controlled close-shave not ending up in a disastrous scrape.

Profile | 25 Feb 2008

Steven Goldfarb

Steven Goldfarb

As happens with many good things in life, Steve Goldfarb came across physics by chance: “When I went to undergraduate school, I was planning to become a medical doctor,” says Steve. The revelation moment happened when he opened an organic chemistry textbook. That was when he realized that what he had found seductive in chemistry were the rules that dictate the order of the chemical elements in the periodic table. “Behind those rules were fascinating physics equations,” he says.

Profile | 18 Feb 2008

Intrepid Rappellers Descend Into ATLAS Cavern

It could be a scene from a James Bond movie. But this action shot of two intrepid rappellers (abseilers) was in fact taken in the ATLAS experimental cavern one night in December. François Butin, the ATLAS experimental area manager, tells the story behind the photograph.

News | 15 Feb 2008

Emil Obreshkov

Emil Obreshkov

Most ATLAS users know Emil Obreshkov only as a man at the end of a mysterious e-mail address. Ceri Perkins went along to meet the man himself, and find out a bit more about him.

Profile | 11 Feb 2008

Alessandra Ciocio

Alessandra Ciocio

When Alessandra Ciocio was given the opportunity to work on the installation of the ATLAS detector, she jumped at the chance. “I was interested in getting this detector to work,” she says.

Profile | 04 Feb 2008

Weina Ji

Weina Ji

The prospect of a life full of challenges is what brought Weina Ji to study physics at the University of Nanjing, in China. However besides the intellectual stimulation that physics provides, she also describes the field as 'useful'. "The logic that you develop while learning physics can also be applied outside this particular world if later on you don't continue in this career," she says.

Profile | 23 Jan 2008

Geoff Tappern

Geoff Tappern

Geoff Tappern, Senior Installation Project Engineer at ATLAS, retired at the end of December, over thirty years after his first visit to CERN. “I came here in 1971 from Rutherford,” he says. “We were designing part of an experiment with Alan Astbury. Back then nuclear physics was still a bit of an unknown science. Cryogenics – I couldn’t even spell the word!”

Profile | 15 Jan 2008

Cables: The “blood vessels” of ATLAS

The cables within the ATLAS detector may be thought of as the blood vessels and nervous system of the experiment; they carry power to the detector, they deliver messages to control its functions and they relay the data taken, ready for analysis. Just as blood vessels and nerves criss–cross and connect the organs and tissues of the human body, cables penetrate the whole of the ATLAS volume, reaching each and every one of its elements.

News | 15 Jan 2008

Dress Rehearsal for ATLAS debut

Dave Charlton and his team have a mammoth job on their hands; Charlton has been tasked with coordinating the Full Dress Rehearsal (FDR) of the computing and data analysis processes of the ATLAS experiment, a run–through which he describes as "essential, almost as much as ensuring the detector itself actually works".

News | 15 Dec 2007

Maarit White

Maarit White

It is something unusual to see a woman-engineer in pink coveralls giving instructions around. But down into the ATLAS pit, this is a matter of routine. Our main protagonist is Maarit White, the Finnish engineer who among many other installation tasks has been in charge of supervising the scaffolding. She has become a sort of an icon among her co-workers, who know her as 'the pink engineer’.

Profile | 11 Dec 2007

Norwegian teachers visit ATLAS

"It's amazing that you have to build something so huge to measure such extremely small things," said Tom Christiansen from Telemark in Norway, after visiting the ATLAS cavern. His sentiment about the size of the ATLAS detector was shared by the thirty–one other physics teachers who, together with Tom, attended the first Norwegian Teacher Programme run at CERN, in November 2007.

News | 11 Dec 2007

Progress on Toroid Magnets

The magnets on either end of the ATLAS detector (called end–cap toroid magnets) dominated November’s work in the experimental cavern. The ATLAS magnet team took a significant step towards finishing work on the ATLAS detector as testing of the magnets began.

News | 10 Dec 2007

The pixels find their way to the heart of ATLAS

Leading up to the lowering of the pixel detector into the ATLAS cavern, final preparations were proceeding quickly.

News | 28 Jun 2007

ESA/NASA astronaut Christer Fuglesang visits the ATLAS cavern

On 14 June, 2007, ESA/NASA astronaut Christer Fuglesang visited the ATLAS cavern. A former CERN fellow working on ATLAS, Christer went on to become the first Swedish astronaut and participated in the STS-116 Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station last December.

News | 14 Jun 2007

The complex and spectacular lowering into the cavern of the huge end-cap toroid magnet on side A

On 13 June 2007 the first of two giant toroid magnet end-caps was lowered into the ATLAS cavern on the A side. This complex and spectacular operation was completely successful.

News | 13 Jun 2007

Triggering and measuring bent cosmic muon tracks with the muon spectrometer barrel for the first time

Data have recently been collected with the toroidal magnetic field will provide for the first time the measurement of the cosmic ray muons' momenta in the ATLAS experiment and allow studies on trigger optimization, chamber calibration, chamber alignment and magnetic field maps. More than one million events were acquired. They are now being analyzed by enthusiastic members of the collaboration.

News | 22 Dec 2006

The ATLAS Detector safety system

The ATLAS Detector safety system (DSS) has the mandate to put the detector in a safe state in case an abnormal situation arises which could be potentially dangerous for the detector. It covers the CERN alarm severity levels 1 and 2, which address serious risks for the equipment.

News | 15 Dec 2006

Development of the ATLAS control room

The ATLAS control room will become the brain of the detector operations. At the moment six of the final fifteen stations are already in place.

News | 15 Dec 2006

First combined SCT/TRT end-cap cosmic rays seen in building SR1

Following the successful combined SCT/TRT barrel test in the Spring 2006, a similar combined SCT/TRT endcap test is currently being performed in the SR1 building on the ATLAS experimental site at CERN. One quadrant of the SCT and two sectors of the TRT have been cabled up and are used in this test. The data taking and combined testing is expected to last until December 11th.

News | 09 Dec 2006

The pixels system: last but not late!

After almost 15 years of R&D and prototyping, the ATLAS pixel detector is finally almost ready for installation in ATLAS, and its first rendez-vous with colliding beams!

News | 04 Dec 2006

Barrel toroid magnet fully charged to nominal field, and it works!

After a few weeks of testing up to intermediate currents, finally, on Thursday evening November 9, the current in the Barrel Toroid was pushed up to its nominal value of 20500 A and even 500 A beyond this value to prove that we have some margin. It went surprisingly well.

News | 01 Dec 2006

First physics pulses in the barrel electromagnetic calorimeter with cosmic rays

The electromagnetic barrel calorimeter was installed in its final position in October 2005. Since then, the calorimeter is being equipped with front-end electronics. Starting in April 2006, electronics calibration runs are taken a few times per week to debug the electronics and to study the performance in the pit (stability, noise). Today, 10 out of the 32 Front End crates are being read out, amounting to about 35000 channels.

News | 20 Nov 2006

Progress on the level-1 calorimeter trigger

The level-1 calorimeter trigger (L1Calo) has recently passed a number of major hurdles. The various electronic modules that make up the trigger are either in full production or are about to be, and preparations in the ATLAS pit are well advanced.

News | 03 Nov 2006

ATLAS copies its first PetaByte out of CERN

On 6th August ATLAS reached a major milestone for its Distributed Data Management project - copying its first PetaByte (1015 Bytes) of data out from CERN to computing centers around the world. This achievement is part of the so-called 'Tier-0 exercise' running since 19th June, where simulated fake data is used to exercise the expected data flow within the CERN computing centre and out over the Grid to the Tier-1 computing centers as would happen during the real data taking.

News | 01 Nov 2006

Inner detector barrel installed in cryostat

Wednesday 23rd August was a memorable day for the Inner Detector community as they witnessed the transport and installation of the central part of the inner detector (ID-barrel) into the ATLAS detector.

News | 23 Oct 2006

First operation of the central solenoid

A new phase for the ATLAS collaboration started with the first operation of a completed sub-system: the central solenoid. It was cooled down from the 17th to 23th May 2006, and the first kA was put into it the same evening as it was cold and superconductive. That makes our solenoid the very first cold and superconducting magnet to be operated in the LHC underground areas.

News | 15 Oct 2006

Successful mapping of the solenoid magnet

The ATLAS solenoid coil is about 5.3m long, has a diameter of 2.5m and is designed to deliver a magnetic field of approximately 2T for the ATLAS inner detector. The superconducting solenoid coil has been integrated inside the LAr barrel cryostat and was installed at its final position inside the cavern in November 2005. This summer - after completion of the extended barrel calorimeters and before the installation of the inner detector - the end cap calorimeters (LAr end caps and Tile extended barrels) were moved for the first time into their final position in order to create conditions as close as possible to final for the solenoid tests and for mapping the field inside the solenoid bore.

News | 05 Oct 2006

Progress with the muon end-cap

After completing the preparation of the sectors of the wheels TGC-1 (first layer of trigger chambers) and MDT (precision chambers) for the side C of ATLAS last spring, the work in building 180 has advanced quickly during the summer: all the sectors for TGC-2-C have been completed during the month of August; currently, two sectors for TGC-3-C are complete, and work is underway for three others. Similarly, assembly, integration and commissioning have progressed well also with the precision chambers, with 12 of the 16 sectors for MDT-A being complete now, and the end of this significant phase of work is only a few weeks ahead of us.

News | 02 Oct 2006

Professor Stephen Hawking visits the ATLAS cavern

On Tuesday 26 September 2006 the ATLAS Collaboration was honoured by a very special visit to the detector in the underground cavern by Professor Stephen Hawking, the famous cosmologist holding the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University (position held by Isaac Newton in the 17th century).

News | 27 Sep 2006

Final components of the semi-conductor tracker (SCT) arrrive at CERN

The first few months of 2006 saw the delivery to CERN of the final components of the ATLAS semi-conductor tracker (SCT), namely the completed SCT end-caps.

News | 23 May 2006

The SCT barrel inserted into the TRT

The SCT barrel was inserted in the TRT on 17 February, just missing Valentine's day. This was a change of emphasis for the two detectors. In the preceeding months there had been a lot of focus on testing their performance. The TRT had been observing cosmic rays through several sectors of the barrel. The two detectors had to be painstakingly aligned to be concentric to within a millimetre.

News | 22 Feb 2006

2005: a busy year for ATLAS

During 2005, the preparation of the ATLAS Experiment has proceeded smoothly and many results were achieved.

News | 15 Dec 2005

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