Already in the first collision preparation of large detector at the LHC: ATLAS (A T oroidal L HC A pparatu S).
Has begun to operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Have you been to start test during the last 3 days. The control room is in full swing (see photo of the webcam this afternoon), and the whole team is at full capacity to ensure they are ready (hopefully in a month) for the first beam and then proton collisions at the LHC.
What are preparing these days is the record of data on muons created in cosmic ray collisions in the atmosphere, as previous studies that trigger inside the LHC.
ATLAS is one of the five particle detectors (next to ALICE, CMS, TOTEM and LHCb) of the LHC, weighs about 7,000 tons. and has an approximate size of 25 × 45 meters (I've always found amazing the huge machine to be used to explore the inner world of matter. Things of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle ).
What is ATLAS?
ATLAS is a multipurpose detector. When the beams of protons produced by the gas interact in the center of the detector, will produce a series of particles with a wide range of energies. Rather than focusing on one type of particles, the ATLAS is designed to measure the largest possible range of energies. It is intended that, whatever process produced or generated particles, ATLAS is able to detect and measure their properties. It is the result of the merger of several types of detectors that were used until the mid 90 at CERN, yielding the current detection system that represents the ATLAS toroidal.
ATLAS is expected to investigate new types of particles that can be detected in high energy collisions at the LHC. Some of them involve the confirmation or otherwise of the Standard Model , while others may lead to new theories, and this is one of the biggest bets of the experiment that has a great future in the world of science. (If you want more information the LHC, you can read my previous posts about this blog).
I leave you with the photo of the Control Room at CERN:
