ATLAS experiment

ATLAS is a general-purpose particle physics experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Its detector records the products of proton collisions to study known particles and search for new phenomena.

Large Hadron Collider: The world’s largest and highest-energy particle collider, located at CERN near Geneva. The LHC supplies the proton collisions that ATLAS records.
Higgs boson: An elementary scalar particle associated with the Higgs field, discovered in 2012. ATLAS co-announced its discovery using proton-collision data collected with CMS.
Proton: A positively charged composite particle made of two up quarks and one down quark, bound by gluons. Protons are the colliding particles accelerated by the LHC for ATLAS data-taking.
CERN: The European Organization for Nuclear Research, an international laboratory for particle physics near Geneva. CERN operates the LHC and hosts the ATLAS detector.
CMS experiment: A general-purpose particle physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. CMS independently studies many of the same collision processes, enabling cross-checks of ATLAS results.
ATLAS detector: A layered detector system that measures particles produced in collisions at the ATLAS experiment. Its tracking, calorimetry, and muon systems convert collision products into measurable signals.
Higgs boson discovery: The 2012 observation of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson at the LHC. The ATLAS and CMS experiments independently reported the signal that established the discovery.
Quark: An elementary fermion that participates in the strong interaction and combines into hadrons. Quarks produced in collisions form jets that ATLAS reconstructs in its calorimeters.
ATLAS Collaboration: The international research collaboration that built and operates the ATLAS experiment and analyzes its data. Its physicists, engineers, and institutions produce the experiment’s results.
ALICE experiment: A CERN experiment designed primarily to study quark–gluon plasma in heavy-ion collisions. Its specialized heavy-ion focus contrasts with ATLAS’s broad program of proton-collision physics.

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