Abha Eli Phoboo

Abha Eli Phoboo

Abha Eli Phoboo was a writer and editor for the ATLAS Experiment’s Education & Outreach team from 2013 to 2015. She is a Press Officer at CERN.

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.

6 August 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...

17 June 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.

3 June 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.

22 May 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.

8 April 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.

12 March 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.

27 February 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.

23 February 2015

"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.

5 December 2014
5 December 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.

3 December 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.

1 December 2014
1 December 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.

21 October 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'.

15 October 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.

21 August 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.

23 June 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.

16 June 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.

2 June 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.

29 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.

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.

29 April 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.

25 February 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.

13 February 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?

16 January 2014
16 January 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?

26 November 2013
26 November 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.

29 October 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.

2 October 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.

23 September 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.

11 September 2013
11 September 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).

16 July 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.

10 July 2013
10 July 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.

17 June 2013

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.

29 September 2012
29 September 2012