The ATLAS experiment

In particle physics experiments, the discovery of increasingly more massive particles has brought deep understanding of the basic constituents of matter and of the fundamental forces among them. In order to explore Nature in its deepest elementary secrets, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built at CERN, Geneva. The LHC provides the highest energy collisions in a laboratory, at very high rates to allow one to study very rare reactions. Two independent sophisticated huge instruments, called ATLAS and CMS detectors, are operated to explore in a most broad way the physics of these collisions. In addition to these two general-purpose detectors, smaller specialized experiments (LHCb, ALICE and some others) are collecting collision data as well.