What is ATLAS?
Peter Jenni, Markus Nordberg, Max H. Boisot · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2011
ATLAS is a new high-energy physics (HEP) detector built by an international community of researchers and located at CERN just outside Geneva. ATLAS is big, global, and exciting. Together with three other detectors, it forms an integral part of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a project that, because of the much higher particle-collision energies and production rates it achieves compared to existing accelerators, opens up challenging new frontiers in particle physics. This chapter presents background material on the ATLAS Collaboration that will help to clarify the chapters that follow. It briefly describes the ATLAS detector and the role it will play in the LHC experiments. It also offers a jargon-free outline of some of the physics that underpins the experiments and the technical challenges that had to be overcome. The history and the organization of the ATLAS Collaboration are also presented, as are its relationships with the host laboratory, CERN, and with the many firms and institutions that helped to build the detector.