ATLAS is the largest general-purpose
particle detector experiment at the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a
particle accelerator at
CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland. The experiment is designed to take advantage of the unprecedented energy available at the LHC and observe phenomena that involve highly massive
particles which were not observable using earlier lower-energy accelerators. ATLAS was one of the two LHC experiments involved in the discovery of the
Higgs boson in July 2012. It was also designed to search for evidence of theories of
particle physics beyond the
Standard Model. This image shows the eight
toroid magnets surrounding the
calorimeter in the centre.
Photograph credit: Maximilien Brice, CERN