U.S. ATLAS Home Page

The detector, dubbed ATLAS, is one of four detectors to be located at a powerful new accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), now under construction near Geneva, in Switzerland.

The LHC, due to begin operation in 2008, consists of two circular vacuum pipes in which protons will travel in opposite directions and collide at nearly the speed of light with a total collision energy of 14 tera-electron volts (TeV), or 14 trillion times the typical energy of an electron. The accelerator plans also to spend one month per year colliding beams of heavy ions such as lead with a total energy of 1,250 TeV, about 30 times higher than at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), currently operating at Brookhaven Lab.

ATLAS is designed to detect particles created by the proton-proton collisions. One of its main goals is to look for a particle dubbed Higgs, which may be the source of mass for all matter. Findings may also offer insight into new physics theories as well as a better understanding of the origin of the universe.

Brookhaven National Laboratory is the host for the 42 U.S. institutions contributing to the project. In total, 164 laboratories and universities around the world are involved in building, installing, and commissioning parts of ATLAS.

The ATLAS detector will have a cylindrical shape with layers stacked onto each other (like the layers of a “cylindrical onion”). Each of the layers detects different types of particles. When particles from the accelerator collisions are produced in the center of ATLAS, they move throughout the detector and are measured by its successive layers.

For more information visit the outreach site or the main ATLAS home page.