The Amazing Hunt for the God Particle

ATLAS detector inside the massive collider is the size of three football fields.

One of the most burning questions in the minds of many scientists is how exactly our universe started. In Geneva, 2,500 researchers came together to create one of the world’s largest particle colliders.
The massive ATLAS detector takes shape under the French-Swiss border. It will help physicists discover how the universe works by observing it at its smallest scale.

The world's largest solenoid magnet will fit inside a steel cylinder at the heart of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). CMS and three other main detectors housed in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may reveal unknown subatomic particles.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is located 100 meters under the ground in Geneva and has a circumference of 27 km (over 16 miles). The massive LHC will be used by researchers to probe the beginnings of our universe.

Claude Leroy, a physics professor from Université de Montréal, was one of the scientists involved in the project and responsible for creating the ATLAS detector used in the collider to provide a new look at the conditions that occurred during the Big Bang and immediately following.
An engineer works on one of more than a thousand magnets that will steer particles toward collision. The collider's innards include pipes for the particle beams and liquid-helium-filled pipes that will cool the magnets to minus 456oF (minus 271oC), so they can carry more electric current and exert greater force.

Slowly, carefully, a million-dollar superconducting magnet is lowered 300 feet (90 meters) into the particle collider. The product of a decade of designing and manufacture, this magnet and similar ones, each weighing up to 19 tons, will be deployed to focus particle beams at the point of collision, with a goal of 600 million impacts per second.

Glistening with sensors, components of the CMS detector near completion for a start-up later this year. As protons collide, detectors will track a flood of data that could yield evidence of elusive particles that physicists seek.
ATLAS is the largest of the four detectors inside the LHC and is a massive device in its own right. ATLAS is 7,000 tons in weight, 46 meters in length, and 25 meters in height.


Leroy conducted the radiation and irradiation studies to ensure ATLAS ran smoothly when in operation. Leroy also created a device called MPX, which is a small device attached throughout the LHC and ATLAS to perform real-time measurements of the spectral characteristics and composition of radiation inside and around the ATLAS detector. The device is said to capture images of what’s inside the detector and its environment like neutrons and photons.
For the LHC to operate, its components must be cooled to a superconducting state. Some components of the LHC will be cooled to minus 456 degrees Fahrenheit by cooling the magnets with liquid helium. Parts of the ATLAS device will be cooled with liquid argon to minus 312 Fahrenheit.

When in operation the LHC will collide two beams of particles at close to the speed of light in an attempt to answer what the 96% of the unknown universe is made of, why particles have mass, why nature prefers matter of antimatter, and what lies beyond Earth’s dimension.