Engineering Projects & Partnerships
ATLAS
Overview
At CERN, the final focusing assembly was first tested at ground level (background) before being lowered into the tunnel and reassembled there. Two of the many U.S. scientists and engineers who have worked on the LHC are Fermilab's Jim Strait, left, first head of the US LHC project, and engineer Joseph Rasson, right, who oversaw Berkeley Lab's contribution.
[The Atlas Experiment] The ATLAS experiment is being constructed by 2000 physicists and engineers participating from more than 150 universities and laboratories in 36 countries. It will search for new discoveries in the head-on collisions of protons at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics CERN. The detector is due to begin operation in the year 2008. The primary purpose of the detector will be studies of the origin of mass at the electroweak scale, therefore the detector has been designed for sensitivity to the largest possible Higgs mass range. The detector will also be used for studies of top quark decays and supersymmetry searches.