Colloquia

The startup of the LHC and the very first collisions in the ATLAS detector

The last three months have seen the Large Hadron Collider at CERN deliver its first collisions at 900 GeV, and later breaking the world record for the most energetic man-made collisions ever. I will review the excellent progress of the LHC leading up to the successful startup in November last year and give you the latest news and plans for 2010 and beyond.

With 7 TeV collisions just around the corner, a large new window of opportunity to see physics beyond the Standard Model is opening up. The ATLAS detector has already recorded half a million collision events at 900 GeV which has provided a first look at the detector performance with collision data and has allowed for mass peak reconstructions of several of the lightest hadrons. In anticipation of the high-energy collisions expected this spring I will review the first results coming out of ATLAS during these exciting times, showing that ATLAS is well on its way to take on the search for the Higgs Boson and new physics phenomena such as Supersymmetry.