• Question: what is the purpose of the ATLAS collider?

    Asked by tostedteacake to Carol, Ellie, John, Philip, Rebecca on 2 Jul 2012.
    • Photo: Rebecca Lacey

      Rebecca Lacey answered on 2 Jul 2012:

      This isn’t really my area of expertise but I do know a small amount about the ATLAS collider project. It was designed to observe particles and discover more about the theories of particle physics which it was not possible to do before.

    • Photo: John Welford

      John Welford answered on 2 Jul 2012:

      It’s not really my area either, but I’ll tell you what I know!

      ATLAS is one of a few different detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator built in Switzerland by CERN. The LHC has been built to collide beams of protons together and see what happens, particularly what particles are produced.

      ATLAS is designed to detect the particles produced. It differs from some of the other detectors at the LHC as it is a more general detector, able to measure a range of different results. CMS is also a general purpose detector at the LHC. Between them and the other detectors they will be producing the results from the LHC experiments.

    • Photo: Carol White

      Carol White answered on 2 Jul 2012:

      The Atlas collider is helping us make huge leaps in our physics understanding by making protons collide head-on at amazingly high energies!

      Atlas is specifically looking for evidence of “dark matter”, which scientists think make up 84% of all the matter in the universe! We really don’t know much about the universe do we…?!

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