Exploring the Mystery of Matter : The ATLAS Experiment

ATLAS is a particle physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN headquarters in Switzerland.

This new atom smasher, the result of more than eighteen years of research, design and construction is a 7000 ton behemoth of metal, glass, cables and computer chips, with 27km of underground tunnels and thousands of magnets operating at below -270 Celsius.

Protons, travelling at nearly the speed of light, collide within the heart of ATLAS, sending out showers of debris to recreate 30 million times a second the conditions that existed millionths of a second after the Big Bang, the event that many physicists believe set our universe in motion.

The ATLAS experiment is the result of a Herculean collaboration of more than 2000 engineers and physicists from 36 countries.

This is the fully-documented story of an extraordinary feat of engineering that may change our understanding of how our universe came into being."