The ATLAS team, from left: Stewart Martin-Haugh, Valeria Bartsch, Anthony Rose, Antonella De Santo, Fabrizio Salvatore and Tina Potter. LHC image courtesy of Maximilien Brice

This week in 2009, Sussex physicists headed to CERN in Switzerland to take part in one of the biggest experiments ever constructed to re-enact the birth of the Universe. 

The Sussex group, led by Dr Antonella De Santo, joined 3,000 scientists from across the world to work on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). 

Here is an extract from the original article in the Bulletin published Friday 6 November 2009:

Sussex physics team joins Big Bang experiment

Sussex physicists are taking part in one of the biggest experiments ever constructed to re-enact the birth of the Universe. 

A group led by Dr Antonella De Santo are now among 3,000 scientists taking part in the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN, one of the largest and most prestigious physics research laboratories in the world, near Geneva in Switzerland. 

ATLAS is one of the two multi-purpose particle physics experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a circular, 27km-long accelerator ring located about 100 metres underground across the French-Swiss border. 

With data-taking starting in the next few weeks, the ATLAS detector (about half as big as the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and weighting 7,000 tons) will seek to discover new physics in the head-on collisions of protons of extraordinarily high energy...

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