eLearning Collaborative

After lunch we got a tour ATLAS which is another detector at CERN which happens to be 82 meters underground. The ambition of this project is to describe all forces as one force. Similar to CMS, it has the same basic layers, but the difference is the superconducting magnets in the muon detectors. The central magnet weighs 240 tons will be moved inside ATLAS, but currently, like CMS it is not put together. The magnets with the red tape are part of the outer muon detection system. Everything that can be seen in the pictures is part of the muon system, all the other parts are inside of ATLAS ready to go.

 There will be 30 million proton bunch crossings per second when the LHC is running and a million proton-proton collisions per second, of which 200 interesting ones are selected with superfast electronics and stored for further analysis. (Extra fact: 7TeV per beam) Inside of ATLAS electronics change the data that is collected into electrical signals and convert them into digital. Most of the cameras are ready and taking data... not actual data from collisions, but from cosmic rays. [Cosmic rays=stuff from outer space]. Underground there are still enough cosmic rays to get data and one of the things cosmic ray showers produce is muons, which is what much of the instrumentation on ATLAS is set to check out.

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