The ATLAS experiment is one of the five particle detector experiments being constructed at the Large Hadron Collider, a new particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland. It will be 45 meters long, 25 meters in diameter, and will weigh about 7,000 tons. The project involves roughly 2,000 scientists and engineers at 151 institutions in 34 countries. The construction is scheduled to be completed in 2007. The experiment is expected to measure phenomena that involve highly massive particles which were not measurable using earlier lower-energy accelerators and might shed light on new theories of particle physics beyond the Standard Model. ATLAS is designed as a general-purpose experiment, so that regardless of what is produced by the collision of the accelerator's proton beams, the results can be measured as accurately as possible.
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