Exploring the Mystery of Matter

The ATLAS Experiment

Claudia Marcelloni, Kerry-Jane Lowery, Kenway Smith

The story of the design and construction of one of the most significant technological wonders of the modern world that may change our understanding of matter.

255 x 245 mm

168 pages

Hardback

ISBN: 978-1-901092-95-0

£20.00

Subject: Science

ATLAS is a particle physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at the headquarters of CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) near Geneva, Switzerland. This atom smasher produces particles for ATLAS to observe. 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 that was designed to find a particle called the Higgs boson, one of the last remaining pieces of the puzzle that describes how our universe works. This is the fully-documented story of the fascinating journey of these passionate scientists as they toiled in cramped spaces and at dizzy heights to complete an extraordinary feat of engineering that may change our understanding of how our universe came into being.

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Claudia Marcelloni, Kerry-Jane Lowery, Kenway Smith

Claudia Marcelloni was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil and has lived in Australia, Singapore and the USA. She currently lives in Geneva, Switzerland. She has a bachelor’s degree in Communications from the ESPM university in São Paulo, Brazil as well as diplomas in business from the International Business School of Sydney, Australia, and in Design and Photography from the UC Berkeley Extension program in San Francisco, CA, USA. She joined the ATLAS collaboration at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research and the world’s largest physics laboratory) in 2006, when she was commissioned to produce a Photo Book about the completion of the ATLAS detector. Today she is the ATLAS Communications Officer. As a non-scientist, she was drawn to work at CERN by her passion for the creative communication of great ideas.

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"The physicists are scrambling like Spiderman, ducking under waterfalls of cables and tubes and crawling into hidden room-size cavities stuffed with electronics. They are getting ready to see the Universe born again"
Dennis Overbye, The New York Times