Experimental HEP Seminar

Fresh news from ATLAS

David Côté

DESY

Working on ATLAS is very exciting these days! After years of preparation, the ATLAS detector was finally completed, in time to record the very first “splash” and circulating beam events from the LHC. Since then, we have also been taking cosmics data with the complete ATLAS detector. Following these spectacular successes, the expectation of imminent LHC collisions pushed ATLAS out of a preparation phase, into an operational one.

Even though ATLAS was generally ready to operate during stable LHC collisions, this showed that important items would have been missing to operate as smoothly as desired, until a large helium leak severely damaged the LHC on September 19th. In this talk, I will review the current status of ATLAS and sketch what will probably happen when the LHC restarts. I will also mention some of the “missing items” from September, taking the ATLAS reconstruction and DPD software as examples in which I have been personally involved.