16 Integration of Detectors into a Large Experiment: Examples from ATLAS. . .
781
16.10 Conclusion
The formidable challenge related to the design, construction, installation, and commissioning of the ATLAS and CMS experiments reached a successful conclusion at
the end of 2009 with the beginning of data-taking. At the time, the next challenge
was as daunting and even more exciting for all the physicists participating in the
exploitation phase: understand the performance of these unprecedented detectors
as precisely as possible and extract the rich harvest of physics, which would
undoubtedly show up once the LHC machine achieved its design goals at high
energy and high luminosity.
Ten years later, after taking large amounts of data at centre-of-mass energies of 7,
8 and 13 TeV and operating successfully at luminosities exceeding even the design
goals of the machine and the experiments, one can look back with tremendous pride
and respect at what has been achieved by the thousands of people involved in the
accelerator and the experiments. But we have also been very lucky and should feel
huge gratitude towards nature which has offered the ATLAS and CMS experiments
the possibility to first observe and later measure the Higgs boson in the somehow
miraculous variety of production processes and decay channels with which it
manifests itself at the LHC. The searches for new physics at this new frontier have,
however, unfortunately not yielded yet any sign of where the solutions of some
of the remaining mysteries of nature might lie. Nevertheless, the physics harvest
already available from this wonderful tool for fundamental research is already rich
beyond belief and the ongoing analyses in the experiments continue to probe the
Standard Model predictions to the utmost of our current capabilities. Might new
physics still emerge from the expected thirty times larger datasets to be collected
over the coming ten to 15 years from the upgraded machine and experiments? The
hopes remain high, yet only nature knows.
Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank deeply P. Sphicas, with whom the review article
of ref. [4] was written. Much of the contents of this chapter are drawn from that review. May all
the ATLAS and CMS colleagues who helped in a significant way to prepare this review find here
also the expression of the author’s most sincere thanks. It would have been impossible to collect
the information in this chapter without the help of many experts in a variety of fields across all the
aspects of the design, construction and installation of these very large state-of-the-art experiments
in particle physics.
References
1. ATLAS Collaboration, ATLAS Technical Proposal. CERN/LHCC/94-43 (1994);
CMS Collaboration, CMS Technical Proposal. CERN/LHCC/94-38 (1994).
2. ATLAS Collaboration, The ATLAS Experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.
JINST 3 S08003 (2008).
3. CMS Collaboration, The CMS Experiment at the CERN LHC. JINST 3 S08004 (2008).
4. Froidevaux, D., Sphicas, P., Annu. Rev. Nucl. Part. Sci. 56 (2006) 375–440.
781
16.10 Conclusion
The formidable challenge related to the design, construction, installation, and commissioning of the ATLAS and CMS experiments reached a successful conclusion at
the end of 2009 with the beginning of data-taking. At the time, the next challenge
was as daunting and even more exciting for all the physicists participating in the
exploitation phase: understand the performance of these unprecedented detectors
as precisely as possible and extract the rich harvest of physics, which would
undoubtedly show up once the LHC machine achieved its design goals at high
energy and high luminosity.
Ten years later, after taking large amounts of data at centre-of-mass energies of 7,
8 and 13 TeV and operating successfully at luminosities exceeding even the design
goals of the machine and the experiments, one can look back with tremendous pride
and respect at what has been achieved by the thousands of people involved in the
accelerator and the experiments. But we have also been very lucky and should feel
huge gratitude towards nature which has offered the ATLAS and CMS experiments
the possibility to first observe and later measure the Higgs boson in the somehow
miraculous variety of production processes and decay channels with which it
manifests itself at the LHC. The searches for new physics at this new frontier have,
however, unfortunately not yielded yet any sign of where the solutions of some
of the remaining mysteries of nature might lie. Nevertheless, the physics harvest
already available from this wonderful tool for fundamental research is already rich
beyond belief and the ongoing analyses in the experiments continue to probe the
Standard Model predictions to the utmost of our current capabilities. Might new
physics still emerge from the expected thirty times larger datasets to be collected
over the coming ten to 15 years from the upgraded machine and experiments? The
hopes remain high, yet only nature knows.
Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank deeply P. Sphicas, with whom the review article
of ref. [4] was written. Much of the contents of this chapter are drawn from that review. May all
the ATLAS and CMS colleagues who helped in a significant way to prepare this review find here
also the expression of the author’s most sincere thanks. It would have been impossible to collect
the information in this chapter without the help of many experts in a variety of fields across all the
aspects of the design, construction and installation of these very large state-of-the-art experiments
in particle physics.
References
1. ATLAS Collaboration, ATLAS Technical Proposal. CERN/LHCC/94-43 (1994);
CMS Collaboration, CMS Technical Proposal. CERN/LHCC/94-38 (1994).
2. ATLAS Collaboration, The ATLAS Experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.
JINST 3 S08003 (2008).
3. CMS Collaboration, The CMS Experiment at the CERN LHC. JINST 3 S08004 (2008).
4. Froidevaux, D., Sphicas, P., Annu. Rev. Nucl. Part. Sci. 56 (2006) 375–440.