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Concept
ATLAS experiment
Summary
ATLAS is the largest general-purpose particle detector experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland. The experiment is designed to take advantage of the unprecedented energy available at the LHC and observe phenomena that involve highly massive particles which were not observable using earlier lower-energy accelerators. ATLAS was one of the two LHC experiments involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson in July 2012. It was also designed to search for evidence of theories of particle physics beyond the Standard Model.
The experiment is a collaboration involving 6,003 members, out of which 3,822 are physicists (last update: June 26, 2022) from 257 institutions in 42 countries.
The first cyclotron, an early type of particle accelerator, was built by Ernest O. Lawrence in 1931, with a radius of just a few centimetres and a particle energy of 1 megaelectronvolt (MeV). Since then, accelerators have grown enormously in the quest to produce new particles of greater and greater mass. As accelerators have grown, so too has the list of known particles that they might be used to investigate.
The ATLAS Collaboration, the international group of physicists belonging to different universities and research centres who built and run the detector, was formed in 1992 when the proposed EAGLE (Experiment for Accurate Gamma, Lepton and Energy Measurements) and ASCOT (Apparatus with Super Conducting Toroids) collaborations merged their efforts to build a single, general-purpose particle detector for a new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider. At present, the ATLAS Collaboration involves 5,767 members, out of which 2,646 are physicists (last census: September 9, 2021) from 180 institutions in 40 countries.
The design was a combination of two previous projects for LHC, EAGLE and ASCOT, and also benefitted from the detector research and development that had been done for the Superconducting Super Collider, a US project interrupted in 1993.
Official source
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