A team of physicists from Hong Kong has now formally joined one of the most prestigious physics experiments in the world. Following a unanimous vote of approval today by its Collaboration Board, ATLAS has admitted the Hong Kong team as a member. The ATLAS Collaboration operates one of the largest particle detectors in the world, located at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's highest energy particle accelerator at CERN, Switzerland. In 2012, the ATLAS team — along with the CMS Collaboration — co-discovered the Higgs boson, or so-called 'God Particle'. The gigantic but sensitive and precise ATLAS detector, together with the unprecedentedly high collision energy and luminosity of the LHC, make it possible to search for fundamentally new physics, such as dark matter, hidden extra dimensions, and supersymmetry — a proposed symmetry among elementary particles. The LHC is currently undergoing an upgrade, targeting a substantial increase in beam energy and intensity in a year's time. It is widely expected that the discovery of the Higgs boson is only the beginning of an era of new breakthroughs in fundamental physics. All these exciting opportunities are now opened up to scientists and students from Hong Kong.
Experimental particle physics. [Dept. of Physics, Drexel Univ]