UVic Café Scientifique | Scientific collaboration and ‘big science’ at CERN

Event Description

At CERN, thousands of scientists from around the world come together in scientific collaborations to explore the fundamental nature of the universe at the smallest scales. CERN’s flagship particle accelerator, Large Hadron Collider, collides incredibly high energy particles inside four different particle detectors located along the collider. The ATLAS Collaboration builds, operates, collects data from, and analyses the data collected by the 7000-tonne, multi-purpose ATLAS detector. In this talk, we’ll discuss the complexities of two aspects of the ATLAS experiment: how we record the output of particle collisions, and how thousands of scientists collaborate to broaden our understanding of the universe.

Speaker: Heather Russell, Assistant Professor, Physics & Astronomy