Facilities and Experiments

Experiments at the Energy Frontier

Project Status: Commissioning

Large Hadron Collider
CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

The Large Hadron Collider will create almost a billion proton-proton collisions per second at an energy of 14 trillion electron volts, seven times higher than any particle collider has previously achieved. It will operate at the CERN laboratory in a 27-kilometer circular tunnel about 100 meters underground. More than 1,200 scientists from U.S. universities and institutions participate in the design, construction and operation of the machine. U.S. scientists will remain active leaders at the energy frontier both here in the U.S. and abroad at CERN.

ATLAS

ATLAS is a particle physics experiment at the LHC that will explore the fundamental nature of matter and the basic forces that shape our universe. The largest-volume detector ever constructed, ATLAS is 148 feet long, 82 feet wide and 82 feet high, and weighs about 7,700 tons.

CMS

The CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) is designed to explore the physics of the Terascale, the energy region where physicists believe they will find answers to the central questions at the heart of 21st-century particle physics. The main volume of the CMS detector is a multilayered cylinder, some 70 feet long and 52 feet in diameter, weighing more than 13,000 tons.