Page 16 - Frontiers of the Universe

Weizmann scientists are prominent leaders in the ATLAS experiment, an international collaboration that is one of the four cornerstones of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The largest machine ever built and the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the LHC’s mission is as simple as it is ambitious: to nd “missing pieces” within and beyond the Standard Model of Physics—the best theory we have to describe nature’s fundamental building blocks.
PARTICLE PHYSICS:
A HIGH-ENERGY APPROACH
Seven-story-high structure within the LHC, the ATLAS detector captures data derived from
40 million high-energy proton and lead-ion collisions that occur every second. Sent instantly to a global network of high-powered computers, this data opens a window to what may have happened during the Universe’s rst moments.
Weizmann researchers helped design and build the current ATLAS detector, and are leading R&D e orts toward
a major upgrade.
By making it possible to observe and measure events occurring within extremely short distances and during brief time ashes—in which the laws of quantum elds dominate and where elementary particles interact with each other—particle physics gives us a better understanding of the Universe as a whole.
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