ATLAS and the Energy Frontier

The ATLAS experiment is a general purpose particle detector based at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. The LHC is a 27km machine that collides bunches of 10¹¹ protons in the middle of the ATLAS detector at a rate of 40 million bunch crossings per second. In each bunch crossing, around 50 proton-proton collisions occur on average, which create new particles that will subsequently decay into complicated streams of particles that are recorded by our detector. Piecing together these complicated pictures allows us to recreate what happened in the collisions and to study the fundamental particles and forces of nature. 

The discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC, which led to the award of the Physics Noble Prize to F. Engelert and P. Higgs in 2013, was only the beginning of a 30 year physics programme. This includes more in-depth studies of the Higgs sector (ATLAS shared the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics “for detailed measurements of Higgs boson properties”), searches for new physics and precision measurements of the Standard Model, all of which open a window upon how nature operates on the most fundamental levels. 

At UCL, we focus on these key outstanding questions about the Universe:

• What is the nature of the Higgs boson?
• Why is the universe stable?
• Up to what energies does the Standard Model continue to describe nature?
• What is dark matter?
• Why is there more matter than antimatter in the Universe?

The UCL group leads many aspects of the ATLAS experiment that will help answer these questions and ensure we fully exploit the vast amount of data supplied by the LHC. For more infomation, see the links below. We are also ramping up physics and performance feasibility studies to inform the European strategy for the next collider at the enegy frontier