Joshua Moss, California State University, Sacramento
Abstract:
Since operations began in 2010, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been colliding protons at the highest energies reached in a man-made environment. The ATLAS detector at CERN is situated around one of LHC's 4 collision points and is measuring the products of these interactions to explore the properties of the universe at the smallest length scales. The fundamental constituents of matter and the forces that allow them to interact are being investigated along with additional questions about the origin of mass, the nature of dark matter, the lack of antimatter in the universe and many more. In the spring of 2017, the LHC will restart its physics program after the winter break and provide proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV at the highest rates yet achieved. This talk will discuss the goals of particle physics, the tools that are used to make the measurements, and recent results from the ATLAS Experiment.
