Apr 15, 2021
The muon spectrometer of the ATLAS experiment has been an important contribution of IRFU since the design, and IRFU is still in charge of the alignment today. The spectrometer plays a key role in the reconstruction of high-energy muons, the detection of which is crucial for the search of phenomena beyond the Standard Model. The spectrometer consists of about 1200 muon chambers that form a gigantic edifice 44 m long and 24 m in diameter.
Dec 23, 2009
Since the accident which occurred on the LHC accelerator several days after its commissioning in 2008, the ATLAS collaboration has been impatient to observe "true" events produced at the centre of the detector, and to make the equipment function under real conditions. On 23 November, following several days of tests with a single beam, Atlas recorded its first proton-proton collisions, at the injection energy into the LHC (450 GeV per beam, i.e. 900 GeV in the centre of mass reference frame of the collision).
