Subatomic records smashed to smithereens

Earlier this year, if you had stood with one foot on either side of the French-Swiss border, you wouldn't have felt it. But deep underground, another world record was broken in the field of particle physics, and this summer more than 1,000 particle physicists gathered in Paris to hear the latest results.

The UVic-ATLAS team is in the thick of the subatomic action at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the 27-km circular tunnel buried 100m below the surface near Geneva. In March, the LHC created its first "bang" at an energy three-and-a-half times higher than previously achieved by a terrestrial accelerator. The ATLAS detector is recording subatomic debris from deliberately orchestrated head-on collisions of trillions of protons, and although it is early days, the thousands of gigabytes of data each year will help researchers probe the possible existence of new dimensions and explore space and time.

UVic physics professor Dr. Michel Lefebvre, founding spokesperson of the ATLAS-Canada project currently led by UVic adjunct professor Dr. Rob McPherson, greatly benefited from early work by UVic particle physicists Drs. Alan Astbury and Richard Keeler. The UVic-ATLAS team now includes Drs. Justin Albert, Robert Kowalewski, Randall Sobie and Isabel Trigger as well as more than 25 students, associates, technicians, computer experts, engineers and scientists.

Ongoing LHC updates: press.web.cern.ch and http://twitter.com/cern