Information for members of the press

What ATLAS is all about: the super-brief summary

ATLAS is a huge and highly complex particle physics detector built by an international collaboration of over two thousand scientists, including over a hundred from Canada. ATLAS weighs about seven thousand tons and completely fills a 46 by 25 by 25 metre cavern situated 100 metres underground, on the 27-kilometre circular tunnel of CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Bunches of protons in two counter-circulating beams will be accelerated to energies of 7 trillion electron-volts (7 TeV), and these bunches will collide with each other in the heart of the detectors, 40 million times every second. The unprecedented rate and energy of the proton collisions in the LHC will allow us to explore the structure of matter and the fundamental forces, as well as search for new elementary particles.

Canadian groups designed and built large parts of ATLAS. As Canada is not a CERN member state or official observer state, and does not pay an annual contribution to CERN, our "dues" were paid in the form of in-kind contributions to the LHC accelerator and its injector complex, worth over 40M$CDN. These contributions were made through TRIUMF and included substantial contracts with Canadian industry.

A more complete one-page summary is also available as Word and pdf.

Press Contacts: ATLAS/LHC in Canada

Professor Rob McPherson, Spokesperson (University of Victoria, IPP)
Professor Richard Teuscher, Deputy Spokesperson (University of Toronto, IPP)
Dr Reda Tafirout, Computing Coordinator (TRIUMF)
Professor Bernd Stelzer, Physics Coordinator (Simon Fraser University)

Press Contacts: Canadian faculty at CERN

Press Contacts at Canadian ATLAS Institutes

Scientific contact and press office (or equivalent) contact for Canadian institutes on ATLAS:

Primary ATLAS-Canada Contacts
Full list of ATLAS-Canada Participants (excluding students)
ATLAS press page at CERN

ATLAS-Canada Press Releases