Early progress: replacement parts were inspected at CERN over the weekend (CERN)
ATLAS stands for A Toroidal LHC Apparatus, while CMS stands for Compact Muon Solenoid.
If either ATLAS or CMS do find what scientists are looking for, it would open up a new frontier for physics. Not only that, our current understanding of matter and energy might have to be rewritten as well.
ATLAS is only part of a much larger machine and project – the LHC or Large Hadron Collider. It is actually the LHC that’s been generating a lot of publicity. Once the LHC gets fired up by the end of 2009, it will be able to cause collisions involving up to 7 TeV or energy. That’s way above the current world record of 2 TeV.
It is believed that such extremely high energies will allow scientists to probe beyond what particle physics’ Standard Model was able to explain.
Then as if that were not enough, plans are underway to up the LHC collision energies to 10 TeV in the months to follow.
Right now, CERN ATLAS is being manned by 2900 physicists from no less than 37 countries. This large-scale collaborative effort, which includes 700 students, is the driving force behind the project.
Although dwarfed by the 27-km-diameter LHC, the CERN ATLAS is quite big for a detector (actually the largest volume particle detector in the world): about 45 meters in length, 25 meters in height, and weighing 7,000 tons.
Its major component is its doughnut-shaped magnet system, made up of eight 25-m long superconducting magnetic coils. Other important components of ATLAS are its Inner Detector, calorimeters, and muon spectrometer.
The LHC project’s favorite adjectives are undoubtedly ‘powerful’ and ‘big’. Not only is the LHC’s structure big; so is the data that will be collected from the experiments. Imagine information from ATLAS can easily fill up 100,000 CDs every second.
Like its predecessors, ATLAS is built to work as a general-purpose detector. That is, it is capable of detecting a wide variety of particles. This is important, as the very high energy collisions brought about by the LHC may produce different particles with different characteristics.
You can read more about the LHC here in Universe Today. Here are the links:
Read more about the CERN accelerator complex in its official website:
Here are two episodes at Astronomy Cast that you might want to check out as well:
Sources:
CERN
Atlas Experiment Page
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