Coast to Coast Seminar Series: "Probing the Origin of Mass: The First Light of ATLAS Data"

Abstract

Four decades of experimental results and theoretical developments point us to energies of one trillion electron volts, or about a thousand times the mass of the proton, to search for the processes that give mass to elementary particles. Reaching such high energies required a new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which has recently begun operation at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. The physics case for the LHC and the massive ATLAS detector which records the results of the interactions that might produce the Higgs boson or other new particles is discussed, and an LHC status report including a first look at ATLAS data is presented.