The ATLAS tracking and vertexing detector

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the high-energy and high-intensity proton accelerator designed to shed light into some of the open questions of particle physics, for instance which is the mechanisms generating the particle masses. ATLAS is one of the two large multi-purpose experiments that should study 14 TeV proton–proton interactions generated by LHC from 2007 onwards. Measuring tracks is difficult in the LHC environment and many challenges had to be overcome to fully exploit the potentialities of the accelerator resulting in a detector of unprecedented complexity and size. The construction of the ATLAS tracker is now close to completion and some details will be given on the technologies which have been adopted and on test results.