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.
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Antonio Cárdenas
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Monica Dunford
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Ned Spencer
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Kamal Benslama
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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.
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Tatiana Klioutchnikova
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Steven Goldfarb
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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.
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Emil Obreshkov
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Alessandra Ciocio
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Weina Ji
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Geoff Tappern
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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.
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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".
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Maarit White
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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