Physical Society Colloquium

Exploring physics at the energy frontier using the ATLAS experiment

Brigitte Vachon

Department of Physics
McGill University

The ATLAS experiment is a complex detector designed to study the fragments from the highest energy particle collisions in the world. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will produce proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 14 TeV thereby recreating extreme conditions thought to have existed a mere fraction of a second after the Big Bang. The data collected by the ATLAS detector will allow physicists to study the fundamental constituents of nature at an unprecedented distance scale where new physics phenomena are expected to appear. In preparation for exploiting the full physics potential of the ATLAS experiment much work remains. Experimental challenges associated with the commissioning and running of the ATLAS detector will be discussed. Different steps involved in the analysis of high energy collision data in search for new physics phenomena will also be described.