Brookhaven & ATLAS

Physicists at BNL are participating in one of the most ambitious scientific projects in the world. They are building a machine the size of a seven-story building that will open up new frontiers in the human pursuit of knowledge about elementary particles and their interactions.

The machine, dubbed ATLAS, is one of four facilities to be located at a powerful 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 can also collide 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 the 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 headquarters for the 42 U.S. institutions contributing to the project (see a complete list). In total, 150 laboratories and universities around the world are involved in developing and testing 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 experiment and are detected by its successive layers.

Brookhaven scientists are making and testing parts of two components of ATLAS: the liquid argon calorimeter, which detects and measures electrons and photons, and the muon detectors, which detect very penetrating particles called muons.

Last Modified: December 3, 2007

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.

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