Contacts
Team Leader: Dr. Robert McPherson
Deputy Team Leader: Dr. Michel Lefebvre
ATLAS "For the Press" web site
The ATLAS Collaboration maintains a web site for the Press. It features a useful Press Kit.
CERN and the LHC
The
Large Hadron Collider, located at the
CERN laboratory near Geneva,
had its first circulating beam in September 2008. First proton-proton
collisions at 0.90 TeV occured on November 23rd 2009. They were quickly followed
by collisions at 2.36 TeV on December 7th 2009, an energy world record
for collisions produced in the laboratory. On March 30th 2010, proton-proton collisions reached 7 TeV
center of mass energy and data was collected until October 11th 2011. Since April 12th 2012, the LHC operates at 8 TeV center of mass energy, the
highest energy collisions ever produced in the laboratory.
The LHC is scheduled to undergo improvements during 2013 and 2014 and resume operation for physics late in 2014, perhaps at 14 TeV.
The research programme of the LHC has already yielded many results.
On July 4th 2012, both the ATLAS and CMS collaborations announced the
discovery of a new particle,
a boson consistent with
the long-sought Higgs boson.
The collected LHC data allows scientists to explore space and
time, and the fundamental laws of nature to unprecedented levels. A
team of UVic scientists participated in the design and construction of the ATLAS
detector which studies the particle collisions. UVic scientists are currently very active in the analysis
of the collected data, and in the development of improvements for the ATLAS detector.
The ATLAS-Victoria group
The ATLAS Collaboration was founded in 1992, and includes the University
of Victoria as one of its founding institutes. The UVic ATLAS group
was led by Prof. Michel Lefebvre, and included Prof. Alan Astbury and
Prof. Richard Keeler. Prof. Lefebvre was the founding Spokesperson of
the ATLAS-Canada Collaboration. The ATLAS-UVic group has been
growing, and now also includes Dr. Justin Albert, Prof. Robert
Kowalewski, Prof. Robert McPherson, and Prof. Randy Sobie. Both
McPherson and Sobie are Institute of Particle Physics
Scientists. Prof. Robert McPherson has been the Principal Investigator
of the ATLAS-UVic group since 2003, and was elected Spokesperson of
the ATLAS-Canada Collaboration in 2007. The particle physics
expertise at UVic goes hand in hand with its close relation with TRIUMF, Canada's National
Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics. TRIUMF staff
located at UVic played crucial roles in the construction of the ATLAS
experiment.
The UVic group is currently composed of over 25 scientists, including
students, research associates, technicians, computer experts,
engineers and physics professors. Since 1992, the ATLAS project at
UVic provides unique opportunities for the training of highly
qualified personnel. Many former UVic-ATLAS members now hold permanent
positions in top institutions in Canada and abroad.
The ATLAS-UVic group has made crucial contributions to the design,
development and construction of the ATLAS detector since 1992. UVic's
contributions focused on detector components, called calorimeters,
specialized in the measurement of the energy of particles. The chosen
technology features liquid argon as active medium, and makes use of a
novel geometrical design optimized in part at UVic. From 1992 to 2004
UVic scientists participated in the prototyping of calorimeter
detectors, in the testing of these detectors with particle beams, and
in the construction of the final full size ATLAS components. Since
liquid argon is very cold, about -188 degrees Celsius, the
calorimeters must be enclosed in purpose-built cryostats. A critical
component of such cryostats are its cryogenic feedthroughs, which
allow nearly 200,000 electrical signals from the calorimeters to reach
the outside world. Most of these feedthroughs were constructed in UVic
between 1997 and 2002, with the support of an $4.0M NSERC Major
Installation Grant. Members of the UVic team spent considerable time
at CERN integrating these components on the final ATLAS detector.
Since 2005 the UVic-ATLAS group has been heavily involved in the final
preparation of the detector leading to first collisions. This
commissioning work involves the testing of aspects of the ATLAS
detector, now in its final location in a large cavern underground
where proton beams will collide. UVic scientists develop and maintain
computer software and methods that are used to monitor the detector
operations, and to ensure that the recorded data is of the highest
quality. Most importantly, UVic scientists are developing strategies
and software for the analysis of the collisions in order to be ready
for the detection of new phenomena, such as the Higgs particle,
supersymmetric particles, or the existence of space dimensions beyond
the three we experience in everyday life. UVic scientists are currently actively
analyzing the data collected at the LHC.
The Canadian involvement in ATLAS and the LHC
Canadian involvement in ATLAS and the LHC has placed us in a prominent
position in the forefront international science project of the decade.
In total Canada has invested $70 million of the $8 billion total in
equipment that is now a crucial part of the CERN LHC accelerator
complex and the ATLAS particle physics experiment. Canadian
researchers have received an additional $30 million to fund graduate
students, postdoctoral researchers and their research on ATLAS. TRIUMF
has provided staff and technical support to make these contributions a
reality. As a result of these investments and the resulting scientific
and technical expertise Canada is a respected partner at CERN and in
the international science community.
No single country could afford to build the $8 billion LHC project on
its own. ATLAS has been built by researchers from more than 150
universities and laboratories in 35 countries. 150 Canadian
scientists (faculty, lab staff, postdoctoral researchers and graduate
students) from eleven institutions across the country work at CERN,
alongside 2000 other scientists from every corner of the globe, on the
ATLAS experiment. Canada has made important contributions to the LHC,
ATLAS and the world-wide computing grid now primed to digest the ATLAS
data.
In 1995 TRIUMF was given the mandate to act as Canada's main
connection with CERN. It was provided with $42 million of federal
funding over ten years to develop and construct components for the
LHC. These projects were completed on time and in budget in close
collaboration with Canadian industry. Over 90% of our LHC funding has
been spent in Canada. There have been a number of spin-offs from this
activity. I.E. Power, Inverpower and Digital Predictive Systems in
Ontario gained expertise in high current power supply design and
fabrication and have competed successfully for an additional $10M in
contracts from major international labs. ALSTOM-Canada, in Tracy,
Quebec improved assembly tolerances for LHC magnets benefiting their
main business, the fabrication of hydro generators. Canadians were
instrumental in the construction of the ATLAS detector. ATLAS
construction was supported by a $12 million grant from the Natural
Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). Canadian
contributions to the ATLAS detector were completed on time and on
budget, are now installed in the ATLAS experiment where they are
currently successfully used to record the LHC collisions.
ATLAS will produce several Peta-bytes (millions of Giga-bytes) of data
per year. Canada has constructed a Tier1 computing centre at TRIUMF
funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the BC
Knowledge Development Fund (BCKDF) at the levels of $12 million and $4
million, respectively. The primary role of the Tier1 centre is the
processing of raw ATLAS data which will be used by physicists to
understand what is going on in the high energy proton collisions. The
final analyses will be performed largely on the Tier 2 computing
centres located at university sites, funded by the CFI National
Platforms Fund. The combined Canadian Tier1 and Tier2 centres give us
"made in Canada" physics analysis ability, positioning ourselves to be
leaders in extracting ATLAS physics over the coming years.
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