News

High-flying physics

Pernilla Craig earned her licence to fly last year aged just 17, making her one of UK’s youngest female pilots. A visit to CERN last week took her deep underground to see dectectors on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and into the sky above the Alps for a bird's eye view of the laboratory.

News | 11th September 2013

New searches for SUSY

ATLAS today presented new searches for Supersymmetry, a theory that could explain the large amount of dark matter in the universe.

News | 20th July 2013

New results on the properties of the top quark

At the EPS HEP conference today, ATLAS released a new precise measurement of the top quark mass using events where both top quarks decay via W bosons to electrons or muons. ATLAS also presented limits on the possibility of the top quark decaying to channels not foreseen in the Standard Model. A comparison of the behaviour of top quarks and anti-top quarks produced at the LHC is in agreement with the prediction of the Standard Model, disfavouring models of new physics that require a large top/anti-top asymmetry.

News | 19th July 2013

New Results for EPS

ATLAS physicists will be presenting new results at the biennial Europhysics conference on High Energy Physics this year. The conference, which will take place 18 to 24 July in Stockholm, Sweden, is organized by the High Energy and Particle Physics Division of the European Physical Society (EPS).

Press Statement | 16th July 2013

Granting a wish

Callum Kerr, 17, visited the ATLAS cavern on 8 July, with this family and a representative from Make-A-Wish Foundation.

News | 10th July 2013

Everyone Here Is Motivated By Physics

In June 1993, ATLAS and CMS were given the provisional go-ahead to submit technical proposals. Twenty years later, for the discovery of the Higgs boson, the European Physical Society has awarded the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize 2013 to the research teams of the ATLAS and CMS experiments. For their “pioneering and outstanding leadership roles in the making” of the experiments, the prize also goes to ATLAS' Peter Jenni and CMS' Michel Della Negra and Tejinder Virdee. We talked to Peter Jenni, who was spokesperson of the ATLAS collaboration for the first 15 years, on ATLAS' past and future.

News | 17th June 2013

What we learned from ATLAS at Les Rencontres de Moriond 2013

Les Rencontres de Moriond, an important conference for the worldwide community of particle physicists, took place from 2-16 March 2013 in La Thuile, Italy. Of all the scientists present, 22 ATLAS physicists had been invited to reveal the experiment's latest findings. What did we learn from this new ATLAS physics harvest?

News | 8th April 2013

ATLAS in the Italian Alps for the Rencontres de Moriond 2013

From March 2nd to March 16th 2013 the mythic "Rencontres de Moriond" is taking place in the Italian Alps at the La Tuile ski resort. For the 48th edition of this famous event, more than 420 physicists, theorists and experimentalists, young and more experienced, coming from the four corners of the planet get together in this pleasant environment to share their most recent results and ideas on particle physics. Twenty-two ATLAS physicists were invited to divulge the latest findings of the ATLAS Experiment.

News | 27th February 2013

2012: A Year for Science – A Year for Discovery

Amazing, incredible, emotional. These are uncommon words for summarizing the annual accomplishments of a particle physics experiment. Yet 2012 has been a fantastically uncommon year for ATLAS, one of the main experiments at CERN: marvellous machine performance, numerous and interesting physics results, plenty of interactions with students and general public, and - last but not least - a major discovery!

News | 20th December 2012

ATLAS in the Land of the Rising Sun for HCP 2012

From November 12th to November 16th, more than 250 particle physicists are gathering in Kyoto, Japan to share their latest results. One of the key international particle physics conferences of the year, the Hadron Collider Physics Symposium 2012 (HCP 2012), will take place this year in the Land of the Rising Sun.

News | 9th November 2012

Happy Birthday ATLAS!

Twenty years ago the name “ATLAS” was first used on an official document, the Letter of Intent, to refer to the detector which has been taking data for nigh on three years now, including those data on which the recent Higgs results were based. It has been two decades of growth, development and hard work, resulting in this year’s observation of a Higgs-like particle. All the more reason for the experiment to take a few moments to look back and celebrate.

News | 29th September 2012

The Physics of Top Quarks

The 5th International Workshop on Top Quark Physics (TOP2012) will take place in Winchester, UK, from the 16th to the 21st of September. It will gather experts in the field of top quark physics as well as PhD students and will highlight the newest results and topics related to the physics of top quarks.

News | 11th September 2012

ATLAS Heavy Ion Results Presented at QM 2012 in Washington, D.C.

The Quark Matter conference, which takes place every two years, is this year being organised in Washington, DC, USA on 13-18 August 2012 (QM2012). It will bring together both experimentalists and theorists from all over the world who are studying heavy ion physics at ultra high energies.

News | 13th August 2012

ATLAS Supersymmetry Searches and More at SUSY 2012 in Beijing

The 20th International Conference on Supersymmetry and Unification of Fundamental Interactions (SUSY 2012) is taking place in Beijing, China on 13 -18 August 2012. SUSY is the theory which, if confirmed by experiment, will be the high energy extension of the Standard Model (SM). In SUSY, every particle should have a massive "shadow" particle or super-partner. Experimentalists have been looking for years for proof of the existence of these SUSY particles or sparticles.

News | 13th August 2012

ATLAS Higgs Search Update

On 31 July, 2012, the ATLAS Experiment submitted a scientific paper describing the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs Boson to the journal Physics Letters B.

News | 31st July 2012

ATLAS Results Presented Down Under at ICHEP 2012

Every other year, particle physicists gather together to share their latest results at the ICHEP (International Conference on High Energy Physics) conference. This year, more than 700 are attending the conference in Melbourne, Australia, July 4-11.

News | 9th July 2012

Latest Results from ATLAS Higgs Search

On 4 July, 2012, the ATLAS experiment presented a preview of its updated results on the search for the Higgs Boson. The results were shown at a seminar held jointly at CERN and via video link at ICHEP, the International Conference for High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia, where detailed analyses will be presented later this week. At CERN, preliminary results were presented to scientists on site and via webcast to their colleagues located in hundreds of institutions around the world.

Press Statement | 4th July 2012

Latest ATLAS Results to be Presented Down Under at ICHEP 2012

Every other year, particle physicists gather together to share their latest results at the ICHEP (International Conference on High Energy Physics) conference. This year, more than 700 are attending the conference in Melbourne, Australia, July 4-11.

News | 2nd July 2012

ATLAS to Present Updated Higgs Analysis Results in Upcoming Joint CERN / ICHEP Seminar

The ATLAS Experiment will be presenting its most recent results from searches for the Higgs Boson at the LHC in a dedicated seminar to be held at CERN on 4 July at 9:00 CET.

News | 29th June 2012

LHC 2012 Run at 8 TeV Has Started

The LHC 2012 run at a beam energy of 4 TeV has started, corresponding to a collision energy of 8 TeV, compared with the 7 TeV runs in 2010 and 2011. The data target for 2012 is 15 inverse femtobarns for ATLAS (and CMS), three times larger than the total until now. The LHC is scheduled to enter a long technical stop at the end of 2012 to prepare for running at its full design energy of around 7 TeV per beam.

Press Statement | 5th April 2012

Mountains of Physics

Experimentalists and theorists are gathering once more in the Alps at La Thuile, Italy, March 3-17 for the annual "Rencontres de Moriond" to discuss latest results in particle physics and cosmology.

News | 5th March 2012

Higgs search papers submitted for publication

The results on Standard Model (SM) Higgs searches that ATLAS reported at a CERN seminar on December 13, 2011, have now been submitted for publication in three papers.

News | 7th February 2012

ATLAS discovers its first new particle

The ATLAS collaboration has announced the discovery of the χb(3P), which is a bound state of a bottom quark and bottom antiquark (bbar).

News | 22nd December 2011

ATLAS experiment presents latest Higgs search status

The latest update of the ATLAS searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson was presented at a CERN seminar on December 13, 2011. As stated in the CERN press release, the new ATLAS and CMS results are "sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the elusive Higgs. Tantalising hints have been seen by both experiments in the same mass region, but these are not yet strong enough to claim a discovery."

Press Statement | 13th December 2011

The ATLAS and CMS combination of Higgs search results

The Higgs Boson is the only missing piece in the Standard Model of particle physics and its search is undoubtedly one of the most important searches in the history of physics. The Higgs boson is the generator of all elementary particle masses in nature. The mass of the Higgs boson itself is unknown, and before the LHC it was searched for in previous experiments but not found. LHC experiments have produced excellent results since the start of the data taking. In ATLAS and CMS a discussion was initiated about a year ago to combine the Higgs search results from both experiments. The framework and the procedure to combine results had to be defined and agreed upon before the combined analysis could proceed.

News | 1st December 2011