ATLAS and The Large Hadron Collider

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Andy Parker is a Professor of High Energy Physics at Cambridge University, with over 160 publications on aspects of particle physics. His current research interests involve experiments to reveal new physics in the Tera-electron-volt energy regime. He is a founder of the ATLAS experiment for the Large Hadron Collider, and for 6 years he was the project leader for the ATLAS Inner Detector, the most complex detector system so far created at CERN. He is also involved in large-scale distributed computing grids, used for various scientific projects. He was awarded the Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching in 1997.

The talk will discuss the latest status and results from the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. Data-taking started in November 2009, and is planned to continue for at least 15 years. Early results will focus on measurements of known processes at the TeV energy scale, such as quark-antiquark production, and studies of the weak interaction. A major goal will be to discover, or rule out, the Higgs boson, a key component of the "Standard Model" of particle interactions. The talk will also discuss the more exotic physics being investigated, such as extra space dimensions, quantum-sized black holes, and supersymmetry.