The Large Hadron Collider - Entering the Era of Tera-scale Physics

Professor Geoffrey Taylor

School of Physics, University of Melbourne

3:30 pm Friday, 7 May 2010, EN413 ( Engineering Building), Hawthorn.

With the Large Hadron Collider now in routine operation at CERN in Geneva, this talk will provide an overview and update of the science program of the LHC and of the ATLAS detector, capturing the high energy proton-proton collision data. A description will be given of the LHC, the largest-ever scientific facility, including a brief account of the widely reported, major disruption that occurred soon after its first attempted start-up in September 2008. The huge ATLAS detector is fully operational and has already recorded many millions of collision events. The talk will describe the physics being sought by the LHC program. The design challenges imposed by the LHC environment and by the frontier scientific program on the ATLAS detector design and operation will be covered. First results will be presented and an outlook of the LHC/ATLAS program provided.

Australian scientists have participated in the R&D, design and construction of the ATLAS detector. The speaker leads the Australian ATLAS program.

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