ATLAS is one of the four experiments designed to investigate the new physics frontier at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. It is expected to start operation in 2007, and will observe and record the products of head-on collisions of protons at energies of up to 14TeV.
The detector is 45m long and is one of the largest and most elaborate particle physics apparatus ever designed. It is a product of a worldwide effort by over 1800 scientists from more than 150 laboratories in 34 countries. The group at Hampton University (an HBCU) has participated, with great success, in the construction of this detector and will now transition to detector operations and analysis of the physics produced at this new energy frontier.
Hampton has played a key role in the successful QuarkNet project, a joint educational effort of the U.S. LHC experiments, aimed at high-school teachers and students.
