ATLAS at LHC - mapping the energy frontier and the darkness beyond

Isabel Trigger
Research Scientist, TRIUMF

Abstract

The Large Hadron Collider and its detectors, including ATLAS, were designed not only to discover the Higgs boson (which they did), but also to map out its properties and interactions and those of the other massive particles: the weak gauge bosons and the top quark, produced in unprecedented numbers at the LHC. But ATLAS has another ongoing mission: to look for signs of new physics beyond the Standard Model, including searches for direct production of dark matter in proton-proton collisions. The talk will introduce the ATLAS detector and its multipurpose design, and then focus briefly on how ATLAS studies Higgs bosons and searches for dark matter.