Spring 2012
Spring Meeting - April 21st, 2012
Grand Valley State University
Featuring: Prof. Bernard Pope (MSU): The ATLAS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, is the world's highest energy particle accelerator. Having taken 15 years to build, it has been operating for more than a year with collision energies of 7 TeV (trillion electron volts). Four large particle detectors are located around the 17-mile circumference of the LHC. Michigan State University (and the University of Michigan) physicists are members of the team of scientists working on the largest of these detectors, the ATLAS experiment. I will describe the LHC, ATLAS, and some of the physics results that have already been obtained. I will also mention future plans for running at higher energies and intensities.